There has been a lot of focus recently on structural racism and white supremacy. In terms of comics, my area of research, there have been a lot of outlets recently sharing lists about comics by black creators and those with anti-racist content. (Thread)

There's great recent scholarship on Blackness & comics:
@dewhaley, Black Women in Sequence (2015)
@prof_carrington, Speculative Blackness (2016)
@DrSheenaHoward, Encyclopedia of Black Comics (2017)
@QianaWhitted, EC Comics (2019)
@rawreader, The Content of Our Caricature (2020)

Still, though, in thinking and looking through the comics and the scholarship, I'm struck by how much work there remains to be done. In my research, I often see just how much past descriptions of social injustice still ring true today.

This time, this recognition happened as I read the words of filmmaker Marlon Riggs, known for Tongues Untied (1989), a film about the lives of Black gay men. He wrote an intro to Rupert Kinnard's B.B. & the Diva (1992), a book of comics featuring Black gay & lesbian characters.

Of comics, Riggs wrote: "Like much of pop culture in mainstream America, the comics offered me a world of unmitigated whiteness—a world in which the special humor and rich colors of my black Southern community were mockingly absent."

Riggs continued: "From panel to panel, I saw, without fully appreciating it until later, continuing testimony to my inferior status within America. Here, too, even in the 'funnies,' African Americans, unacknowledged, remained invisible."

Riggs further continued: "Homosexuality, not merely unacknowledged but typically not even thought of then, occupied a place outside the margins of not only the comics pages but the entire newspaper."

In the following paragraph, Riggs wrote: "Still, like most 'other' Americans, I read these comics, seduced by a brand of humor that though familiar was decidedly not my own—…"

Riggs concluded: "…humor that insidiously, often unself-consciously, conditioned (& conditions) readers, young & old, into mute subscription to the belief that the 'American experience' & 'American humor' are unquestioningly white & antiseptically straight."

Relevant links:
http://cbldf.org/2020/06/anti-racism-graphic-novels-reading-resources-list/
https://etechlib.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/anti-racism-matters-in-graphic-medicine-too/
https://www.comicbookherald.com/supporting-black-comics-creators/
https://www.cbr.com/black-comics-artists-must-read/
https://www.cbr.com/black-comics-writers-must-read/
https://cartoonistsofcolor.com/