Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was an incredible movie. It's easily the best animated movie of 2018, it's the best Spider-Man movie ever made, and I think it is one of the top 5 comic book movies of all time.
Not only was it a treat for comic book nerds, but it had great representation. Spider-Gwen was such a hit with young women in test audiences that Sony announced two future movies involving Spider-Gwen almost as soon as Spider-Verse released.
I'm half white, half Asian, so I'm not at all in a position where I should speak about representation issues for African-Americans nor Latinx people when it comes to Miles Morales, but I am multiracial, and I'm more than qualified to speak about representation issues from that perspective.
Multiracial Neuroses About Identity
Perhaps you recall when Tiger Woods took offense to being referred to as black.
It's not that he objects to being identified as black, but that he objects to being identified as only black, as that involves a failure to recognize his other racial heritages, and that is something many multiracial people can be a bit touchy about, including me. I'm going to try and explain why that is.
This isn't popular a popular opinion, but I consider racism to be a property of not only individuals, but of cultures. I'll get into that more later in a later post, but everyone who participates in this society is at least a little bit racist because our culture is racist. Racism isn't an either-or thing, it's a matter of degree.
When I was a child back in the 1970s, people who first encountered me were often taken aback and confused. They would stare at me like I was a particularly bizarre specimen in a petri dish. Because our culture is racist, people treat other people differently based on their race. Because I was a multiracial kid, people were taken aback and confused because they did not know whether to treat me like a white person or like an Asian person. People would invariably pick one and treat me like I was only that.
On top of that, America is a highly segregated society and was even more so back in the 1970s when I was a child. So around other Asians, I was the white kid, but when I was around other white people, I was the Asian kid. I fit in nowhere. For me there was no "us" that I could feel a part of.
For me, the extent of this was less bad than for a lot of multiracial kids from the same time period because I was raised on American military bases, where white-Asian mixed kids were quite common, but I still got stuck with the permanent identity crisis common to multiracial Americans, particularly my age and older (I hate to admit this, but I honestly don't know to what extent younger multiracial people deal with the permanent identity crises because I just don't know any multiracial people outside my family).
Asians deal with racial issues, but post-World War 2, the racism we deal with is a lot less bad than it used to be, and far less bad than what Latinx, indigenous, and African-American people have to deal with. On top of that, I'm half white. So the racism I had to suffer was a whole lot less bad than for almost any other person of color. I just want to make it clear that the permanent identity crisis multiracial people deal with is not some kind of terrible social injustice like making little children believe that African-Americans are inherently dumber and less moral (to name one glaring example). But it is [bad word] weird and it never goes away. It just sort of lingers in the corners of your mind, pecking at you with every social interaction you have.
I never feel like I fit in with any group (America is still depressingly segregated) and that will probably never change as long as I live. That's why I bristle so when people treat me like I'm only white or treat me like I'm only Asian. When you treat me like only one thing, it's as if you're trying to deny the other part of me, which in turn feeds the permanent identity crisis.
Back to Miles Morales and the Soundtrack
This brings me back to the Soundtrack for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I loved the soundtrack in the movie, so I went right out and purchased the whole album from Google Play. I don't subscribe to a music service because I'm an elderly curmudgeon; I still buy MP3s individually.
Because I'm an out-of-touch old fart, I'm not familiar with any of the artists on the soundtrack. I know that Jaden Smith is the son of Will Smith, and that's about it. Because of my lack of familiarity, it's entirely possible that half of the artists are Latinx and I simply don't know it, but from what I can hear, only one of the tracks has an explicitly Latinx sound to it. It's all hip-hop and only one track sounds like Latinx-influenced hip-hop.
Hopefully, based on what I said above, you know why I have a problem with this. It's the same thing that happened to Tiger Woods. Because of that stupid American one-drop rule, anyone with even a little bit of African blood tends to get treated as though they are only African-American. That started out as an evil law to allow slave-owners to increase their wealth through rape, but to this day it still governs many of our social attitudes with regard to race. That's why people kept treating Tiger like he was black and only black, which is what annoyed him.
It looks like the same thing happened with Miles Morales with regard to the soundtrack. He got one measly song that acknowledged his Latino half, and the rest of it is African-American hip-hop. Mind you, it's more than possible that Miles mostly listens to music from one half of his heritage. When I was a teenager, I had a little bit of Japanese rock or heavy metal in my music collection, but it was almost entirely Western/white music. Miles wouldn't be the only multiracial person who listens to mostly music from one part of his or her heritage.
But even if that is the case, there are still representation issues to consider. That soundtrack is not good representation for Latinx fans of the movie, and I imagine plenty of multiracial people such as myself also have a problem with the fact that the soundtrack is mostly African-American.