11. Why Always White Dudes?
DC ComicsNow, as far as why the overwhelming majority of superheroes created tend to be white dudes, we know it's because historically comic books are created by white dudes, for white dudes, so they're aiming things at their audience and writing about what they know. As for the internal logic of why so many of the masked vigilantes who fight evil across the pages of Marvel and DC Comics are so thoroughly whitebread...yeah, that begins to fall down a little. Especially when, when you look at the numbers, it means that a ridiculous amount of the world's white population is superpowered compared to everyone else. Take a look at the current demographics in the United States, which is where most superheroes crop up. If we assume that the make up of the fictional Americas in superhero comics are pretty much the same as in real life - since they sure do look a lot like the IRL USA - then we see that white people are still in the majority but, according to the most recent census, there's still a good thirty percent of the population that isn't. And as far as we see it, we don't get the same split in comic books at all. Even worse, there's a frightening amount of black superheroes who have "Black" in their name. What's up with that? It's stuff like this that means people make a big deal when Cyborg is announced for the Batman v Superman film, or when the new Ms Marvel is Muslim. Because it's a problem of representation for the diverse comic readers in the real world, and because it's insane that in a fictional world that's meant to be better than ours, somehow it's still the white man that comes out on top!