X-Men And Fear Vs Oppression

I’ve been reading and watching some stuff about comics and other world-building concepts the last few days and come away with a huge question I think I’m now ready to answer for myself: why are the X-Men in Marvel’s movies and comics actually shown as oppressed?

I know that they have been seen as a stand-in for a lot of different groups of people who are oppressed by society, such as people of colour, gay people, and other minorities. But what I’ve started to realize now is that this doesn’t actually make any sense.

What does make sense is the normal humans in the Marvel universe being afraid of mutants, even hate them, either on a general or on a personal level. The rooster of mutants includes people like Magneto, Storm, and Phoenix - all of whom could easily raze whole cities to the ground. To be afraid of people who can do that is just a normal reaction of our survival instinct. And such fear can easily turn into hatred, too, so it also makes sense that at least some people would outright hate mutants. So far, so … not so good.

But oppression isn’t just one group of people hating another group of people. Conservatives and liberals hate each other, but none of them oppresses the other. Oppression isn’t even necessarily tied to hatred or fear. Women usually weren’t feared by men in the past, but they were oppressed as a group. There’s no sign in “The Handmaid’s Tale” that the men of Gilead outright hate or fear women, but they consider them ‘below’ a man and thus consider it right to control them and take away their rights. The southern slavers before the Civil War didn’t hate black people as a such, but considered those slaves below them and not even fully human, so they saw it as perfectly normal to own them and treat them like cattle. And afterwards, it was still considered true that people of colour weren’t as intelligent and, if you get down to it, worthy as white people, so it was okay to limit them by making certain areas ‘off limit’ to them and keeping the best things to the white people.

Oppression is a systemic thing, it’s built into the foundations of a society. And oppression only works if the oppressed has no way to rebel against it. When women started demanding rights and showed by their numbers and their actions that they were ready to fight for them, they got more rights. When the black civil rights movement picked up speed, oppressive laws fell and the imbalance was righted some (far from completely, there’s still systemic racism in the US which works against POC). When gays started demanding the same rights, laws declaring their sexual orientation illegal fell and rights were slowly granted. All those example of oppression aren’t completely gone now, there’s still something left in the system, but they have left the area of outright oppression.

The point about this is that oppression only works as long as power is firmly on the side of the oppressor. Once the oppressed get power or realize they already have it, oppression becomes harder and harder until it’s gone. And this is where the mutant-‘oppressed group of choice’ analogy is failing.

Mutants are by definition a group with power. Most mutants we see in the Marvel universe have some kind of power which is above human scope. There’s also some who are simply strange-looking or can do things on a very low level, but the majority of mutants seen in Marvel stories has awesome powers. They can read minds, lift things with a thought, control weather, heal in a heartbeat, throw fireballs, freeze everything around them, and many other things. Even if we put aside the most powerful of the mutants, a group of them (as the X-Men, but not only them) could probably overcome a lot of adversity. With a good leader who knows how to make the best of each team member’s abilities (whether mutation or not), such a group could easily take control. Mutants are a power factor of the world and those who have power are not those who will be oppressed.

A lot of people hate the 1% - the richest people in the world. But they will never be oppressed, because due to their money and social influence, they will never be in a situation where they can be oppressed, where their rights and possessions can be taken because they’re powerless to prevent it. The very same would be true for mutants. A lot of people would fear or even hate them, but due to their powers, they wouldn’t be oppressed. The idea alone that mutants can be controlled is ridiculous, no matter whether we’re talking about mutants being forced not to use their powers or whether we’re talking about mutants not being allowed to propagate. First of all, mutations happen at random - while it’s highly likely that two mutants would also have a mutant child, two normal humans can have a mutant baby, too. So stopping mutants from propagation (for fear of them replacing mankind one day) is only delaying, but not stopping the inevitable (if the erasure of homo sapient by homo superior is evolution’s next step). And how to force mutants not to use their powers? Technology might help, but can be tricked or destroyed. The first thing a mutant rights movement would do would be to figure out how to disable technical means. And once they are disabled, the consequences wouldn’t be nice for those who did the oppressing. And the idea of mutants controlling other mutants would only lead to giving some mutants more power to wield - such as turning against their master and using all those mutants under their control against the enemy.

In a real-world ‘mutants are real’ situation, it would be far more likely that mutants would be elevated to a privileged group, so the normal humans could rely on good mutants to help them against bad mutants (mutant police vs. mutant criminals). And if not privileged, they would at least not be oppressed, because every try at that would be fated to fail and only bring bad blood which could spell the doom of humanity.