Black Spaces with White Faces in Static Shock
Static Shock represents an appropriation of the traditionally black rhetoric of "brotherhood" in order to heal an injured whiteness whose represented dysfunction is associated with urban spaces, limited purchasing power, and family dissolution brought about by an absence of white paternal figures. Virgil Hawkins, the ordinary ego of superhero Static Shock is somewhat of a reluctant hero in that his powers are narrowly determined. His adventures never affect spaces beyond the neighborhood as with the global dramas of Superman or Batman. Although it is one of the first cartoons to represent a black superhero, Static Shock reflects many of the limiting markings accompanying black comics and stereotypes of blacks as secondary to whites that Benjamin Demott notes.Static often relies on the wiser counsel of his white best friend, Richie Foley who like Static's first enemy Hotstreak emends Virgil's intellectual oversights in phrases popularized in culture as Black English. A major organizing contrast in a particular episode, "Child's Play," counterbalances signs of Virgil's abundance against signs of his white antagonist's lack. While our hero's father, a community leader and principal, is concerned about letting Virgil use the ATM, V
Dwayne conjures up a Sumo warrior from a video game to destroy the bank. Similar video game commodity phantoms are drawn up to combat Static during the climax at the mall. That Asian-themed video game personas would do battle with an African American super hero at a mall should not shock us; after all such thematics play directly into the very video game and comic book industry in which the cartoon participates. "Child's Play" dramatizes a reversal of racial stereotypes. Instead of a black family racked with poverty, we are presented with a white family living in the projects, complete with a disdainful thug-like prodigal son, Aaron, who's just returned from reform school. Moreover, Aaron justifies his crimes as a form of social rebellion, thus situating himself as a social and economic victim in relationship to society. After leading his fawning brother into a space clearly marked as the inner city, Aaron meets with an African American friend. What better way to alert us to signs of Aaron's moral slippage back to his evil ways? Learning of his brother's power of materializing his desires, conspicuously made up of commodities, Aaron escorts his brother to a bank where he explains that the institution has done them all personal harm. In addition to casting white characters in roles typically associated with blacks, the cartoon indirectly de-politicizes black culture by utilizing themes such a
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 948
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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