Even so, I certainly had the model for it: I was allowed to prefer Wonder Woman to Superman, but I wasn’t allowed to imagine Wonder Woman as black.Ĭomic books have long famously told stories of oppression-characters grapple with feelings of otherness and alienation, fear of discrimination, a need to hide a true identity. I didn’t yet have a vocabulary that included “white feminism,” a shorthand term for a “race-blind” form of feminism that ends up centering the needs of white women at the expense of women of color. These episodes were usually resolved with an appeal to commonalities and the message that racists were the only people who “saw color.” According to popular culture of this era, gender differences were empowering, but racial differences were divisive. From Family Ties to Golden Girls, shows during this time tackled race and racism without ever acknowledging that racial differences mattered. “Race shouldn’t matter,” the late ’80s had told me through the “very special episodes” of my favorite TV programs. It seemed this sentiment was everywhere I turned at the time.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman declared pointedly.

I told her I’d wanted to make my heroine look like me. A white mother who was supervising the students saw my work with shock, she asked why I’d “ruined” my picture. Later that week, at an after-school event, armed with a coloring book, a brown crayon, and my mother’s voice still in my head, I filled in Wonder Woman’s skin to match my own. So she can be whatever race you want her to be.” Not wanting to dash my hopes, she added, “But she’s not real. “She’s white,” my mother told me, perhaps wistfully, but definitively. Maybe I could believably be her for Halloween? Or maybe, simply, I could be wonderful, too. But in many iconic pictures in the comic books I read, Wonder Woman appeared to have a trace of melanin that made me think- maybe? As a child, I had seen the Amazonian princess portrayed by Lynda Carter, who looked unmistakably white, on the syndicated television show I loved.

It was 1989-almost 30 years before I’d eagerly await the premiere of the first Wonder Woman movie. When I was eight years old, I asked my mother if Wonder Woman was black.

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