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How to Make a Blacker, More Truthful Spider-Man
Great power now wears Jordan retros
In June, I got my Black joy when Sony dropped the trailer for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the newly released follow-up to 2018’s Spider-Man, one of my favorite games of all time.
The child in me marveled at how much the trailer gets right. Morales swings like an amateur to show his greenness to web-slinging. His winter jacket, surely a North Face (I just know it is!), has the crazy fur hood collar. I knew he had to be rocking a crisp pair of constructs to complete the Harlemite look. Morales retains the costume that tastefully updates the classic look with a noir-ish black and red scheme. And most importantly, the creators fixed the hairline issue that was the most jarring feature of his character in the previous game.
The improved hairline design signals the work Marvel and the Black creators it hired had to do to get Black fans to accept Morales as a game character. A significant hazard concerning Black characters — especially ones created by White creators — is that they don’t escape the White gaze. Even when they are earnest, White creators cannot help but give us the Black heroes they think we want.
Black creators corrected the earlier mistakes of Morales’ character and gave…
