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Abstract

The 1960’s and 1970’s birthed many great movements in American history, one of such being the Black Culture movement that helped elevate societal acceptance of African Americans nationwide. The aim of this research is to assess the strength of the minority influence that African Americans had in the realm of comic books during the Black Culture Movement. Minority influence is the occurrence wherein a minority group changes attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the majority. In the context of comic book representation, changed attitudes would manifest as lowered stereotyping of Black characters measured by a positive shift in character depictions. Through comparing character traits including socio-economic status, job complexity, and social inclusion, it was found that post-BCM characters showed higher levels of positive depiction.

Conclusions

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Methods

Results

The Influence of the Black Culture Movement on Minority Representation in Comic Characters.

Joshua I. Diaz & Christopher R. Warren

College of Liberal Arts

Department of Psychology

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31 Black comic characters grouped by pre-BCM and post-BCM category were compared on three variables.

  • Socio-Economic Status. A way of describing people based on their education and income. Low(1), average (2), wealthy (3).

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  • O*Net Job Complexity/Zone. Whether the characters assigned occupation in the comic qualifies as needing little prep (1), some prep (2), medium prep (3), considerable prep (4), and extensive prep (5).

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  • Social Inclusion. The character has little (1), average (2), or full (3) opportunity to partake in society fully.

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Figure 1. Mandrake the Magician and his servant Lothar (Circa, 1935)

Figure 5. Luke Cage Debut’s in Luke Cage Hero for Hire (1972)

  • Acculturation research unravels processes which aid minority group assimilation into the adopted society.
  • Representation is a major part in developing of Ethnic-Racial identity among youth (Benner, 2018).
  • Minority influence may facilitate social change in social network structures that resemble the United States’ (Jung et. al, 2021).
  • Black comic character depictions were measured pre-BCM and post-BCM in attempts to quantify change that correlates with social and political movements the era studied.

Research Question.

  • Is positive change in representation measurable through social movements

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Using online comic archives such as Public Domain Superheroes and the Library of Congress as well as performing background searches about the demographic information of each character, African/African American comic characters from mainstream publishers based on popularity from their era were identified.

Analysis of the efforts made by proponents of the Black Culture Movement using Moscovici’s Genetic Model of Influence was employed to develop upon the research findings.

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Figure 2: A between subjects one-way ANOVA showed significance in differences of O*Net Job Complexity scores between pre-BCM and post-BCM African/African American comic characters F (1,28) = 5.68, p =.024. Such that pre-BCM characters had significantly lower O*Net Job Complexity scores (M = 2.14, SD = 1.61) than post-BCM characters (M = 3.44, SD = 1.37).

Figure 3: A between subjects one-way ANOVA showed significance in differences of social inclusion scores between pre-BCM and post-BCM African/African American comic characters F (1,28) = 25.09, p < .001. Such that pre-BCM characters had significantly lower social inclusion scores (M = 1.64, SD = .75) than post-BCM characters (M = 2.75, SD = .45).

Figure 4: A between subjects one-way ANOVA showed significance in differences of depicted socio-economic status (low, average, or high) between pre-BCM and post-BCM African/African American comic characters, F(1,28)=19.76, p < .001. Such that characters coded pre-BCM movement were depicted as having significantly lower socio-economic status (M =1.36, SD =.63) than those coded post-BCM (M =2.38, SD =.62)

Discussion.

  • Characters who emerged before the start of the Black Culture Movement had lower overall scores of S.E.S., Job Complexity, and Social Inclusion than those who emerged after the start of the Black Culture Movement.
  • Moscovici’s Genetic Model of Influence used to analyze efforts employed during the Black Culture Movement aimed toward increasing positive representation.
  • Representation has been found to be an important influence on individuals Ethnic-Racial Identity (Rivas-Drake et al., 2014)
  • Strong ERI has been studied to increase resiliency in individuals, a trait that can be yielded in one's navigation of goal achievement, mental health and social inclusion (Saafir, 2020).

Limitations

  • Notable limitations of this study include sample size (n = 31) and extensiveness of measures.
  • Due to these limitations the homogeneity of variance assumption was violated in the analysis test for social inclusion.

Advancements.

  • Future studies should aim to measure characters across social and political movements on more intensive inclusivity scales.
  • Broader range of benefits: The trend observed could be used for advancing acculturation research aimed to discover ways of changing media portrayals of marginalized groups.

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I’d like to thank Dr. Warren and the members of his research lab for their contributions to this study.

Scan to view this poster, as well as other projects of Dr. Warren.