It is hard for sure to know what all to write about. I plan to do a post sometime about whitewashed villains and if they are as bad as other, whitewashed characters. But this post is not about people who are not white in the source material. This post is about the albino villain stereotype and how it can be a problem. White villains are not unusual or uncommon. But albino doesn’t mean white the same way and they can be persecuted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_people_with_albinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism_in_popular_culture
It was ABC that introduced me to this problem in a segment of their show What Would You Do? They included footage of the The Matrix Reloaded characters The Twins, said not to be albino but clearly like they could easily be that. The Princess Bride had a minor villain that was simply called The Albino. He was not the major villain of the movie and didn’t do much outside of being a lackey briefly. But those are just two examples of albino villains.
Now the reason that I’m writing this post is in regards to the character of Tobias Whale from the show Black Lightning based on the comic book villain who is an albino African American. (I would say black person, but I prefer this terminology instead. This character is played by an actual albino named Marvin Jones III or Krondon who is also African American.
It is hard to think of this as a problem on the show. But they don’t focus on albino discrimination or even have another albino on the show. The show is largely a black cast focusing on black issues. They like to focus on discrimination of blacks and other black issues that are all well and fine. But they don’t do a good thing by having an albino as the big bad of not just the first season but the entire series. They are too focused on one set of problems that they don’t seem to realize that they are causing another. It is hard to know how or even if they will address this in the series going forward before it ends. One can hope that the villain is taken out finally. But they won’t address problems with albino discrimination as far as I can tell based on what we’ve seen on the show.
While the show is right to focus on discrimination and do it in a largely good way, they haven’t done themselves any favors by ignoring another issue and continuing on the albino villain narrative. They could focus here and there on other issues facing other discriminated classes. But it might be hard for them to realize that albinos aren’t just white people and aren’t evil in reality any more or less than that of the typical person of any race or health status.
If they covered it on the show (which they very well might have) I haven’t seen what they might have said about it. I can only hope that they can do something before the end instead of just making Tobias a black kingpin who isn’t even black. I’m not even sure that I like the black gangster stereotype, but that is also worth a different blog post or two as there tends to be cliché villains of all sorts of types on TV. Will they address the issue at all? Or will it just be a problem that is not well known?
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