forever done with clever writers saying ‘hey, let’s have the black guy be racist’
mack on agents of shield, pike on the 100, it’s allegorical racism in a world where normal racism doesn’t really apply somehow, so the only visible racism is performed by black men
and the white guys look super enlightened by comparison bc they’re not allegorical racists
anyways why do ppl like this show bc one of the showrunners? last week tweeted that the canon bi girl is going to end up, not with her tragic dead lesbian gf, but the angry white boy who has murdered hundreds of people IN THE LAST FIVE EPISODES
I don’t think Mack was portrayed as racist, or even short sighted or irrational. He was scared and wanted Daisy contained. He didn’t advocate killing her. Further, he is now one of the inhumans greatest supporters.
By your measure, you could call Joyce Summers racist for not immediately accepting Buffy as the slayer, Elena for not accepting Damon and Stefan…Showing characters reacting badly to things they don’t understand is realistic and a sign of a well rounded character.
Now, Pike has taken a very Trump like stance on the grounders and is playing on people’s fears. I can see the frustration here.
mack had a preexisting prejudice against aliens – which he claimed as a rational response to aliens like loki, but when it turned from ‘the worst behaved aliens’ to ‘all aliens by proxy’ that stops being true – and daisy got caught up in it, but he eventually overcame it.
but if you swap hunter for mack and asians for aliens, it’s clearly just racism. mack //was racist against aliens// but then he met a nice one and got over his prejudice. it’s not even subtle.
for comparison, joyce was being allegorically homophobic, like bobby’s mom in x2, all ‘have you tried …not being a mutant?’ the difference between joyce and mack is that mack hated what daisy was, where joyce hated what buffy did.
pike hates grounders, mack hates aliens. mack doesn’t have to want to kill aliens to be racist against them. though jemma did want to! aaaaaall of macks arc could have been on jemma, except they needed to give those traits to someone who can embody them without making the white audience feel bad, so her xenophobia arc was like two episodes where macks was a season and a half.
(Note that Bob Morley, the actor who plays Bellamy, is half Filipino, so as to not derail this convo.)
But yes! This is so annoying. I was putting it down as xenophobia, but allegorical racism, that’s it. It’s like that one weird ass book a while back that tried to portray some white girl as the victim in a “flipped” society, where apparently to make a commentary on race, the persecuted people had to be white and the bad guys Black. I assume they’re trying to make racists see what it’s like by taking away typical dynamics, but they just end up with extremely unsympathetic Black characters, so…? How would that be convincing racists? That’s how they see the world anyway. And it’s usually with white characters there to call them out, too, so it’s just bad all around.
