Very, very tangentally related to something Doc Lemming was talking about

[james_davis_nicoll]

What's the correct response for a superhero who discovers their crime-fighting name, selected in all innocence and without malice, happens to be an ethnic slur?

Come to think of it, this situation has come up before [1]; the late Mark Gruenwald decided to give the new Captain America's sidekick the same superhero name the original Cap's orginal side-kick used, Gruenwald being unaware that there could be anything problematic about calling an African American man "Bucky". I know they changed the name but I don't recall how it was handled in-story.

1: Note that Marvel also once named a superhero after a combination of cocaine hydrochloride mixed with morphine sulfate; presumably Speedball himself was unaware of the other meanings of his name. In his defense, he was just a teenager.

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Growing up in Southern Missouri in the 1970s, I heard the term "buck wild" a lot, but I can't recall it ever registering with me as a racist slur. In fact, I remember neighbors across the street using it all the time for a variety of things; "that squirrel went buck wild in our bird feeder" kinds of stuff.

"Black buck" was fairly common and obviously used as an insult, at least where I lived, while at the same time on TV and in movies I was seeing it used in satire as an example of clueless, outdated racism.

This is all anecdata of little or no significance, mind. But what else is LiveJournal for?