YouTuber Eric July recently uploaded a new video where he roasts the Marvel Cinematic Universe for their tokenized and unoriginal black characters. In fact, he claims the “Marvel Cinematic Universe is a f****** joke when it comes to this diversity bullshit.”
July begins the video by defining what he means by tokenized.
“When I use the word tokenized, I’m referring to one or two different things. You have a character that exists solely to be representative of some sort of minority group or demographic like that. And then you have, the one I speak about the most, and a classicly white character gets turned into a black character be it a copy of him in the comic like a Miles Morales, which is just a tokenized Spider-Man, or crossing into live-action. So you have a classically white character in the comics, but when they depict them in live-action they are black.”
July lists out a number of comic book characters that have been tokenized in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and notes that the only original black characters in the MCU are for the most part the Black Panther cast.
July lists out all the characters that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has tokenized as well as ones that have been hinted at following Avengers: Endgame:
- Nick Fury
- War Machine aka James Rhodes
- Baron Mordo
- Heimdall
- Valkyrie
- MJ
- Captain America
- Captain Marvel
- Mar-Vell
- Iron Man
After listing out all of the characters, July states, “Just think about. Think about those characters. They are largely brought in as copies as one way or another or they are just completely tokenized. And when they crossovered into the live-action film they put a black person to fill the role.”
He adds, “It’s insulting! It’s f****** insulting when you consider that. Just think about it. I know most of you all have never thought about it like that. Damn! They keep championing this diversity and inclusiveness. The black characters that they bring in are not original. The vast majority of them are not original outside of the Black Panther film and family and Wakandans. Everybody else is just a copy of another character, of a classically white character.”
July continues, “I just want original black characters. That’s it. I don’t want no f****** hand me downs, bro. And that’s what y’all champion.” He goes on, “They insult these motherf****** and they don’t even realize it. They don’t even realize it because they’ve convinced them that they are doing something positive.”
July concludes, “The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a f****** joke when it comes to this diversity bullshit.” He then mocks Marvel, “Congratulations Marvel, you’re really helping a lot of black people by showing them – Hollywood has to show us everything for us to feel legitimate about ourselves. And the way that they are doing that is by taking classically white characters and then handing them motherf****** down to the black characters after they’ve done put them through the grinder for decades instead of just developing classically black characters, which they already have. A lot of them are on my f****** wall. Congratulations Marvel.”
What do you make of July’s take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Do you agree with him?