Hello,
I'd need an audio recording of this article for my students in a standard British or American accent.
Thanks in advance!
Through Spider-Man, the X-Men and many other characters, the late Stan Lee sought to make a positive and lasting difference.
Last summer, when images of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville circulated on social media, [Stan] Lee responded with a powerful statement of his own. “Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today,” he wrote. “As true today as it was in 1968.”
The words he shared originally appeared in Stan's Soapbox, a column he wrote for Marvel that was published in the same year Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
From The Fantastic Four to the X-Men, his heroes were outsiders who fight for a better society - no surprise, given they were created during the height of the civil rights movement.
X-Men has often been praised for its portrayal of mutant oppression and its reflection of the fight for civil rights. Fans have even compared Professor Xavier and Magneto's differing views to King and Malcolm X's respective ideologies.
“I always felt the X-Men, in a subtle way, often touched upon the subject of racism and inequality,” Lee told the Washington Post in 2016.
Alongside his long-time collaborator Jack Kirby, Lee also created Black Panther, the first black superhero to appear in comics. This year's film version was praised for providing the representation many black audiences had been craving for.
According to Jesse J. Holland, Black superheroes are “being used as symbols in American culture.” He explains “ Back when I was reporting in Ferguson after the Michael Brown death, I started seeing images of the black Captain America, that's being used by Marvel, being used in protests. And I think we'll see a lot of the images of the Black Panther around the country now that the movie is about to hit, and then the book is out. So I think not only are they going to be entertainment on the screens, but they'll also be used as icons, as symbols of the way this country is diversifying, and about how we see ourselves as a country. We don't see ourselves in just one color or two colors anymore. We see ourselves as a huge, diversified country whose heroes can be of any race.
“How Stan Lee's superheroes helped change the world”, Taylor-Dior Rumble, BBC, 2018
