so as soon as i said you would have to rewrite batman to be black i started thinking about how i would do it. here's what i have.

first, here's why i think this is necessary: you could just racebend batman and be done with it, but i think there's a real opportunity in reimagining the character as a black American, and how race shapes his background and the circumstances of his vigilante career.

the wayne family can still be old money: they are descendants of prosperous free northern blacks who arrived carved out a place for themselves in gotham, which for our purposes is a chicago stand-in.

the wayne family isn't reclusive, but it shies away from public life and only interacts with white society when necessary. if it has a guiding creed or belief system, it's a booker t. washington-style uplift ideology.

thomas and martha wayne take this seriously. while lucius fox runs wayne enterprises—a obscure but wealthy and profitable conglomerate—bruce's parents work as philanthropists, devoted to the black community of gotham, which is still segregated and disadvantaged.

(this vision of gotham will be a bit inspired by DC, so it will have a well-known HBCU for which the wayne family is a major benefactor)

now, the origin of batman. the situation is the same. the killer is still a man named "joe chill." it still takes place in "crime alley" after the wayne family—with like an 11-year-old bruce—see a play or movie. the difference is all of this happens in black, segregated Gotham.

when the call comes in that two people were shot and killed, the police...shrug. they take their time. they're indifferent to bruce. alfred is there (and, what the hell, he's still michael caine), and they ask him if he was assaulted.

it isn't until they realize who the victims were—and again, the waynes may be well-known in black gotham but far less so in white gotham—that grasp the magnitude of what happened. by this point though, it's too late and the killer is never caught.

bruce comes away from this experience with two emotions: grief at his parents' death, anger at crime, and rage at the police. as he gets older (and here we are borrowing from the tradition of black autobiography), this becomes a fierce, righteous anger at racism.

he doesn't go to the HBCU, forsaking his family's legacy at the school. he instead travels abroad, learning the skills he needs to be batman, and also trying to experience life free of American racism. (borrowing from Douglass and DuBois here).

when he returns, he decides to take a different path than his parents. he's abandoned uplift in favor of a more crusading spirit. he's more public facing. white and black Gothamites know who the waynes are now. and when he finally enters the fray as batman...

...his targets are crime and police brutality. he becomes a problem for the cops and the world of organized criminality, making himself an enemy of both. jim gordon still exists in this world, but he's one of the few black people in the GCPD and is sympathetic.

batman becomes a number one target for the cops, a target for organized crime, something of a folk hero for black gotham, and highly controversial—even hated and disdained—among white gothamites.

as i write this out i realize i'm basically adapting big parts of Walker's Nighthawk into a proper Batman story, which is to say, again, read Walker's Nighthawk

to add to this real quick, someone had the idea of making Joe Chill a cop and i think that is perfect. nothing changes about the death of batman’s parents scene, but the implications are vastly different.