In RAR #16, I gave an example of a 1940s story in which American Indians had to be stigmatized because they had grievances against the U.S. government. But by the 1970s no one reading or writing comics would have doubted that the tribes' many grievances were justified. Thus BRAVE AND BOLD #121 (1975) pits the team of Batman and the Metal Men against a team of aggrieved "redskins" who extort the government for concessions by taking over a train stocked with such prized government documents as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Charlie White Wing is one of three leaders who have "passed" in WASP culture so as to become docents for this mobile museum, and writer Bob Haney may or may not have meant to imply that the three of them were able to pass because they were (in Charlie's words above) "half-breeds." To be sure, both the three organizers and their "red brothers" are all given the same light red pigmentation. Anyway, Haney had a formidable task: to evoke a sense of danger to the good guys while not unduly vilifying the extortionists. His solution is to make everyone happy with a secondary threat: unnamed foreign agents place a bomb aboard the train and the superheroes must work with the Indian insurgents in order to save themselves, the train and its precious relics. It's a facile solution, and it even loosely implies that the extortionists will be forgiven their sins and released without prosecution. But the intent was good, whatever the execution.
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