Taki's Mag

“Paul Kersey” was the name of Charles Bronson’s character in Death Wish (1974), the “vigilante” classic about an ordinary man who avenges an attack on his family by picking off the criminal lowlifes plaguing his city.

Our hero can only continue his crusade if he remains anonymous. That makes “Paul Kersey” the perfect nickname for an American author and blogger who is secretly waging his own war.

It started, Kersey tells me by email, back in May 2009. At the time, the satirical “Stuff White People Like” (SWPL) was a popular site that spoofed faddish Portlandia-style hipsters.

At the same time, Kersey and some friends “were watching videos on YouTube and the hilarious ‘Popeyes Runs Out of Fried Chicken’ report was on. This was an actual news report out of Buffalo, and it showed black people incredulous that Popeyes would run out of fried chicken. It was hilarious. I decided right then and there that Americans needed to know the Stuff Black People Don’t Like.”

And so SBPDL was born. His blog started out as a small-scale spoof of SWPL, but its mix of candid commentary and videos has developed a dedicated following.

Kersey notes that two years later, semi-mainstream comedian Daniel Tosh now highlights similar videos on his popular Comedy Central series. “There is an audience for it,” says accidental pioneer Kersey. “A massive audience.”

Every day, Kersey’s blog chronicles life in what he calls “Black Run America” (BRA): affirmative-action outrages, the latest “racist controversy,” the recent “flash mob” phenomenon, and popular culture’s portrayal of blacks and whites.

The latter topic animated Kersey’s book Hollywood in Blackface. Now he’s released a collection of essays on the same theme, Captain America and Whiteness: The Dilemma of the Superhero. Both books are self-published via Amazon’s CreateSpace.

Captain America looks at the evolution of iconic characters such as Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the book’s eponymous hero. In our “politically correct” era, says Kersey, these familiar superheroes are losing their “white” identities.

“Pretty much every character created in what is known as the Golden Age of Comics was the creation of a Jewish writer,” Kersey explains. “Perhaps at the time, Superman was a story of the Jewish experience in America, an outsider trying to assimilate into a new world, but that character has come to represent something else.”

Indeed. Those Jewish comic-book pioneers (most of whom were second-generation immigrants) were eager to display their patriotism through their creations. The famous first issue of Captain America depicts the red-white-and-blue superhero knocking Hitler off his feet—months before America formally entered the Second World War.

Alas, most of those artists and writers are long dead and their creations are now corporate property. Hence the unedifying spectacle of Superman “renouncing his American citizenship” this year because “truth, justice, and the American way” are “not enough anymore.”

“When Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, The Phantom, The Shadow, The Spirit, and others were created, America was 90 percent white,” says Kersey.

“In a country that is increasingly nonwhite,” he continues, “this ‘whiteness’ is now a nuisance.” He points out that in 2000, a DC Comics Justice League storyline made the Green Lantern African-American “because they didn’t want a bunch of white guys saving the world again.” Then in 2002, Marvel announced they were doing a series depicting Captain America as black—something to do with the Tuskegee experiment, apparently.

So it comes as no surprise that Marvel Comics has killed off the white Peter Parker/Spider-Man and replaced him with a half-black/half-Hispanic character. A film unmasking this makeover is scheduled for release in 2012—and creator Stan Lee isn’t thrilled about it.

But if Spider-Man becomes darker, what happens to the villains?

Kersey notes, “If you watch the 2002 Spider-Man film, all of the people that he apprehends are white. Never mind that between 2003 and 2009, 89 percent of the murderers in New York City were Hispanic or black.”

He isn’t sure the “Disingenuous White Liberals” (DWLs, as he calls them) who run the comic-book industry have thought that matter through. Kersey sarcastically applauds them for (accidentally) reflecting reality:

“Having a half-black/half-Hispanic Spider-Man is hilarious, because his origin story is quite simple: Horrible rates of black and Hispanic crime in New York City can only be dealt with by a half-black/half-Hispanic hero. A white hero would be called racist for dealing with these thugs, so having [a biracial hero] don the red and blue tights makes absolutely perfect sense.”

Unless, as is likely the case, the villains in Spider-Man’s universe remain lily-white. Then Hollywood execs will be obliged to explain why they’re glorifying a black-Hispanic superhero who only beats up Caucasians.

I have a feeling that the biracial Spider-Man movie won’t be coming out next year after all.

Meanwhile, Kersey plans to keep writing and blogging.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned from doing SBPDL,” he tells me, “there is a huge base of people out there (conservative, libertarian, Democrat, Republican, atheist, Jew, Christian, etc.) that is tired of Black-Run America. If one conservative would say ‘no more’ to one of these members of organized blackness when they try and shake them down, you’d see a star made overnight.”

That star won’t be Kersey, however. Like his fictional namesake and the superheroes he writes about, Kersey plans to remain anonymous:

“I’m young—27—and have family members to protect.”