Comic Book Cover

I chose this comic book cover because it represents a few of the stereotypes that America has within its society. The stereotypes represented here are the white man being the strong hero to the helpless but attractive white female, or “damsel in distress”. The white man is also fighting of an “evil” being that seems to be represented as either a black or Asian minority.

This item relates to the class material because we have been studying various stereotypes throughout the growth of America. It always appears that the Caucasian males are always superior to everybody else within the country, and are the ideal people to want to be. Caucasian females still are higher than the minorities, but have a stereotype to be viewed as helpless, and need to be protected by males. From what the comic book cover is representing, the minority male seems to have captured the Caucasian female, and tied her up keeping her captive for some reason. The person that comes to the rescue is the Caucasian male, and proceeds to fight off the minority males, because he represents evil within the situation provided on the cover. Many of the articles we have read which had to deal with the stereotypes of African Americans versus White Americans pretty much show the exact same thing. In the movie Ethnic Notions, there was a silent film that was produced, which showed an African American chasing a helpless Caucasian female, showing that the African Americans were evil within society, and search to cause harm to Caucasian females. In an article called The Ethics of Living Jim Crow was about how African Americans still received unequal treatment even though the laws of equality were already in effect. For example from that article, if an African American bellboy in a hotel was to look upon a Caucasian female with her supposed partner in the room, he risked the chance of either being yelled at or beaten. This shows that the Caucasian males were protective of their female counterpart, and supposedly believe the minority groups as not being allowed to even look at the Caucasian female. Another example was with what happened to Emmett Till. Emmett had just said a greeting to a Caucasian female in a store, and the result of that was him being brutally murdered by a group of Caucasian males. These stereotypes were real, and the comic book cover is a vague representation of these situations.

I think that this cover gives a very accurate representation of how stereotypes were during that time period. Though it is quite unfortunate that these stereotypes actually existed, and the minority groups were always posed as being on the bottom ranking, and either deemed not worthy for anything, or as a threat to the Caucasian society.