Like, I'm not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but "it's a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous" has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can't engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.
To underline what I mean about "the right to possess the capacity for violence", let's peel back the allegory and bring it back to the real-world issues that are allegedly being allegorised.
Every time the cops roll up and shoot some poor guy thirty-seven times in the back because the cell phone in his pocket looked kind of like it might be a gun, the public conversation always centres around questions like "are the police telling the truth about thinking it was a gun?" and "were the police reasonable to assume it was a gun?"
These are not the right questions to be asking.
The right question to be asking is "so what if it was a gun?"
Would the public execution of a guy who was literally just walking down the street have been justified then?
It's not accidental that stories of this type are most popular in America, where the people who can be counted on to argue that cops are behaving correctly when they kill on sight every time they see a member of a visible minority who looks like they might be packing are the exact same people who argue that carrying concealed automatic weapons without a permit is the God-given right of every red-blooded American man, woman and child.
This is not hypocrisy. They know exactly what they're doing. It's not about who is and is not dangerous: it's about who has the right to be dangerous.
