Writing at The Nation — home of the Cloward-Piven strategy to bankrupt the actual nation — Adam Serwer laments the lack of historical accuracy in a movie about a fictional super soldier.
In the vein of what Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to as a “convenient suspension of disbelief” in X-Men First Class, Captain America: First Avenger dutifully ignores the civil-rights struggles of the 1940s. Well, not exactly — where X-Men simply didn’t mention the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, Captain America: First Avenger pretends segregation didn’t exist in the 1940s.
In the comic books, Gabe Jones, one of Marvel’s “Howling Commandos,” is the first black soldier to serve in Nick Fury’s integrated unit. This rewires American history a bit seeing as though integration didn’t begin to take place until President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order, but at least it acknowledges that it is rewriting history.
Fretting over the historical accuracy of movies about comic book heroes is, you know, kinda dumb.
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