It's a Bird, It's a Plane

My child has entered the superhero phase.  He was Spiderman for Halloween.  He begged for the talking Hulk hands ("You're making me angry!  You won't like me when I'm angry!  Arrrggghhhh!").  He wants a Superman cape for Christmas.  So, as the doting parents that we are, Big Bren and I decided to strip Brendan's room of all the Thomas the Train paraphernalia and decorate it with the best superheroes of all time.  So why, oh why, is it that there are no superheroes of color?

Don't get me wrong.  I am not one of those super-ethnic people who only wear Kente cloth or anything like that, but I do want my child to be proud of who he is.  Just like I want him in a school that celebrates diversity, I want his role models (if we can call them that) to be of different shades.  And heroes do not just come in White.

I thought about scrapping the whole idea when I couldn't find one lousy mainstream Black or Brown superhero to stick to his walls.  But Big Bren prevailed when he said that Brendan would be shaped by the totality of his experiences, not just the images that are plastered to his walls.  That may be true, but, really, not a single one?  No one stopped to think that little brown boys may want a superhero to call their own?  Sometimes it's through the little things that we gauge our progress as a people.