Daily Comics Digression #10: Baxter Stockman And April O' Neil's Legacy of Race-Swapping

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a franchise so comprehensively ridiculous in concept that it, of course, resulted in amazing success and popularity, has announced a new cartoon series. The internet has responded with some outrage surrounding the changing of April O'Neil from a white woman to a black girl.

There are a few points that I would like to bring up.

Dat jumpsuit

Firstly, while some may think it's neat to have ethnic representation, O'Neil is a distinctly Irish name, so erasing one ethnicity in favor of another leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The Irish have had a long history of getting a raw deal. Further, as some have noted, there seems to be an increase in the removal of famous red heads from popular media. Jimmy Olsen from Supergirl was also recast as someone who is not a carrot-top, and there was some discussion of race-swapping Mary Jane in new entries of the Spider-Man films. What does the industry have against gingers?

No, not that Carrot Top! My eyes!

On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that April O'Neil specifically has been portrayed differently throughout the years. In her early comic book appearances, her ethnicity is arguably ambiguous. Due to the comics being black and white, one could argue that she's Latina, White, or even Mulatto.
It should be noted, however, that as the comic continues, she seems to be a white woman, and the comic pretty clearly knows how to denote black people as evidenced by Baxter Stockman (we'll get to him in a second). Some casual online reading even states that April may have originally been intended to be Asian as well. Perhaps that's why her ethnicity is so difficult to pin down early on.

Can't really get way from that Irish "O'Neil," though. In addition, it can't be ignored that whatever her original comic origins, pop-culture has come to know her as a particular person for years. Throwing that all away feels cheap.

But we're not done talking about race swapping yet, not by a long shot. Baxter Stockman, a pretty cool mad scientist character, is another point that bears discussion. Baxter, a black man in the comics, was whitewashed into a measly pointdexter type for the beloved 1987 cartoon. Rumors for this change vary. Maybe the image of a nerdy scientist getting browbeaten by his superior (Shredder) was more palatable if the guy was white. Perhaps casting a black man as a villain at the time violated social norms. Or maybe it was generic whitewashing. Who knows?

I personally remember being surprised to find out that that the original version of Stockman, far from being an obsequious, nasally speck, was a confident black man. The original version was cool, and it's great that recent cartoons and media have embraced the original version of the character.

So while some people may take the race-bait of this discussion to unhealthy places, I think that both of these instances of race swapping, in either direction, are a disservice to the source material.