The response toTitans, Netflix’s new superhero drama, from some fans when it first aired on DC Comics’ own streaming network in the US was frankly horrifying.
For the uninitiated, Anna Diop – the Senegalese American actor – has all but quit social media after she received a torrent of racist abuse from people who objected to her portrayal of Starfire, or rather, her look as Starfire.
The character is an orange-skinned alien in the Teen Titans comics, but she’s far from the only thing that’s different about the show to what appears in print. You wouldn’t expect to see Robin saying “F**k Batman” in the strips for a start. Beast Boy is not green-skinned in the show as he is in the comics, and Raven is younger.
Diop has drawn most of the ire from a certain set of fans, however, and it isn’t hard to see why. You didn’t need them to use racist terms to make it obvious. But they did anyway.
I was by turns appalled, saddened and disgusted by this. But it’s hardly the first time this has happened in geek culture, which encompasses hardcore fans and those of us who started consuming it before it became the juggernaut of billion-dollar franchises it is today.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi, with its diverse cast, caused similar ructions in certain corners of fandom, which I wrote about when it was released. Another non-white female actor, Kelly Marie Tran, who is Asian-American and played Rose Tico, copped most of the flak. She too withdrew from social media after enduring a toxic barrage.
So does geek culture have a problem with race, and women? A diversity problem? You could easily come away with that impression from these ugly episodes.
On the other hand, when Marvel finally gave a film to a non-white lead, in the form of Black Panther, it was a smash. The same was true of DC’s Wonder Woman, and Suicide Squad, a diverse ensemble piece in which Will Smith was the biggest star. Suicide Squaddid rather better with fans than with critics, by contrast to the Black Panther and Wonder Woman, which both groups raved about.
Merchandise from all three has been prominent at recent Comic Cons I’ve attended at London’s Excel. A preview screening of the first 30 minutes or so of the Oscar-winning Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse, focusing on Miles Morales, an African American-Latino character, was standing room only.
So it isn’t all bad news. Perhaps geek culture has less of a diversity problem than it has a social media problem.
Regrettably, there has always been a subset of nasty little racists. But they have been validated by social media, which they have weaponised.
I felt some of these people’s ire when I criticised the reaction to the diverse cast of The Last Jedi, and Tran in particular, in an earlier column.
You see this sort of thing occurring in other fields too, however. Sports is an obvious example.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine, who like me has a scientific background, recently bemoaned what he saw as the growing prominence of flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, people peddling myth in opposition to established scientific fact, and a dangerous myth in the case of the latter.
These people too have always been around. They too have weaponised social media to spread their sometimes dangerous fictions and draw attention to them.
How do we deal with this? What do we do when the protection of free speech allows hate speech to spread like a virus over the internet?
The businesses running social media platforms have been appallingly slow to react to the bile that they are responsible for spreading. The recent ousting of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, from Facebook is welcome. So is that of Alex Jones, the American peddler of right-wing conspiracy fictions such as the claim that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a “put up job”.
Those two are still able to spit bile. They still have their free speech. It’s just no longer on social media.
But platforms have been slow-footed. Anti-vaxxers are still jumping on doctors who challenge their rubbish in the US. And the racism directed at people such as Diop continues to be vented.
It might be a generation or more before we learn how to effectively deal with social media and the harm it can cause.
In the meantime, I guess the best we can do is to keep on calling out the scumbags and exposing them for the maggots they are, while at the same time giving our full-throated support to those like Diop and Tran, whom they target. I hope we see a lot more actor
