Featured Essays Superman Superman and the Question of Race Kal-El, Clark Kent, identity, and acceptance. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on March 26, 2025 Action Comics #1 cover art by Joe Shuster Comment 0 Share New Share Action Comics #1 cover art by Joe Shuster Someone once quipped “Superman is a fantasy comic book about a powerful straight white man who is nice.” Which is pretty funny and also probably correct about some versions of Superman. There are other versions, though. Guess which I want to talk about? One could argue that Superman (or at least some versions) isn’t white. He’s not even human. He’s an alien from the planet Krypton. His marvelous powers derive from that fact. OK, I hear some of you say, but he looks exactly like a white guy1 and everyone treats him or at least his persona Clark Kent as white. How is that not being white2? It might be useful, if one were a member of a deprecated non-white ethnic minority, if it were possible to present oneself as white. News flash: it is possible and people have done this frequently enough that there’s an accepted word for it. Perhaps several words. One is “passing.” Historical examples abound. Some who have opted to pass have done this so effectively that their descendants had no idea that their ancestors had been considered non-white. Pre-Crisis Superman is more like someone consciously passing for a white American better than he is like someone who believes he is one by default. He reserves his birth name, Kal-El, for use by family and close friends. The public knows him by an adopted stage name. To his co-workers, he uses the unremarkable (in an American context) Clark Kent. If you were to ask his co-workers what religion Clark Kent is, they might guess Lutheran or Methodist or some other sort of Protestant. None of them would suggest the correct answer, “Raoist,” because that’s not a detail Kal-El shares with co-workers. Additionally, because he possesses abilities no standard model human has, from super-strength to invulnerability to super-senses, Kal-El has to be continually on guard lest he accidentally reveal he is Kryptonian by, say, casually lifting a truck out of his way3. Not only is Kal-El an alien but in many continuities, he is an undocumented alien, having been rocketed to Earth as a baby. He never passed through any formal immigration process. Now, the border policies in place when the 1938 version of Superman would have landed on Earth were considerably less stringent than they are now, but they did exist and Kal-El was in violation of many of them4. Later versions of Superman broke the law to an even greater extent. Having arrived as a child on Earth, Kal-El has done his best to assimilate into and be a constructive member of the dominant culture5. He not only embraces his adopted nation’s values; he uses his unique abilities to exemplify them. This is in no way unusual for immigrants, although the manner in which Kal-El pursues this goal is unusual. However, his public faces (Clark Kent, and to an extent Superman) are different from the Kryptonian one would encounter in the Fortress of Solitude. Kal-El is a true blue American! And he’s also a Kryptonian born and bred, who finds it prudent to be judicious about how he presents himself to his fellow Americans. It’s probably not entirely coincidental that Superman was created by two Jews6, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were both sons of immigrants (and Shuster was an immigrant himself, having moved from Toronto to Cleveland at a young age), in a time when prejudice against immigrants was on the rise, when antisemitism was rife7 and most white Americans did not question the numerus clausus policies then in place. Their creation, Kal-El, can be an inspiration to Americans, celebrated across the nation… as long he first circumvents reflexive white American xenophobia by convincing them he is one of them.[end-mark] It’s pretty weird that most Kryptonians look just like white Americans. It’s probably due to something the Guardians of the Universe did. Most of the weird stuff in the DC Universe seems to because of the Oans, one way or another. Of course, if Kal-El had been purple and be-tentacled, Siegel and Schuster couldn’t have told the stories about him that they wanted to. ︎Who is and who isn’t white varies considerably by era. Ben Franklin, for example, dismissed the “swarthy Swedes” as very definitely not white. Within living memory, Italians weren’t considered white. Given this, it’s most reasonable to assume white means what we point to when we say it. And I am not pointing at any Kryptonians just now. ︎Interestingly, the old Superman radio show, Kal-El is a lot more casual about using his powers while in his Clark Kent persona than in his comic book version. In the “Clan of the Fiery Cross” serial, Kent thinks nothing of leaping through a window to save a boy from certain death. The show seems to think speed and blatant gaslighting can preserve Superman’s secret ID, but it is hard to believe his co-workers don’t know Superman and Clark Kent are the same man. It is fortunate that infant Kal-El was found by the Kents. If Superman had landed in front of William Joseph Simmons, “Clan of the Fiery Cross” would have played out quite differently. ︎If you want to be depressed, read this article on Paddington’s legal status in Britain. ︎Since Crisis on Infinite Earths, the assimilated immigrant passing aspect of Superman seems to have been largely transferred to his colleague J’onn “The Martian Manhunter” J’onzz. Post-Crisis Kal-El was decanted on Earth, with no personal experience as a child of Krypton. J’onn J’onzz arrived on Earth as an adult, is very much a Martian, and while he can pass as a white American, this is a conscious choice to better blend in with humans, if only because his human colleagues are in habit of keeping the corpses of dead aliens as trophies. Also, J’onn isn’t particularly enamored with the US. ︎I should point out there are parallels between Superman and Moses but also significant differences. Moses, for example, while raised as an Egyptian royal, rejoined the Jews to led them out of Egypt, whereas Kal-El remains on Earth with the humans. Yeah, yeah, Krypton blew up. There were an astonishing number of Kryptonian survivors. ︎In the context of institutionalized antisemitism, Lois Lane’s incessant “Yeah, you claim to be a white guy from Kansas and you look like a white guy from Kansas, but what are you, really?” takes on an entirely different tone. ︎The post Superman and the Question of Race appeared first on Reactor.