A close friend of mine loves to quip that one cannot be racist and still like the X-Men. His reasoning for this is that the X-Men stood for equality. At the surface, it’s easy to see how he came to that conclusion. Marvel clearly uses mutant as a heavy-handed metaphor for racial minority. This isn’t a unique conclusion either, as the screenshot below illustrates.
A common thought…
However, recently I was talking with an acquaintance when I shared the anecdote of my friend. The acquaintance piped up; Why? Most of the X-Men are White. And outside of Storm, I couldn’t name another racial minority clad in a Professor Xavier jumpsuit. But hey, I’m hardly an expert in the realm of comic books. So, I couldn’t really speak on the matter. With that said, it was like seeing a dangling thread on a sweater; I just had to pull.
Given my ignorance, I realized that I needed to call in some backup. My friends and family are stuffed to the brim with comic book connoisseurs and Marvel fans. I approached these resident experts and asked them to list off as many racial minority X-Men as they could. Borrowing the brains of my loved ones served as a great springboard to dive further.
Of course, the flaws of my friends-and-family are obvious; they’re human. Their craniums are capable of storing only so much raw information, and that’s assuming they’ve kept up on the vastness of the MCU and the constant comic book releases. Thus, I enlisted the help of Microsoft CoPilot and Duck AI to help me as well.
With that said, I needed to include some guardrails around this fact-finding mission. First, I excluded mutants that aren’t visibly human. For example, Beast and Maggott were not counted, ditto for those with blue/green or other non-human skin tones. After all, one must be a human in order to have a race. Next, I’m only counting those with Asian, African, Indigenous, or Hispanic ancestry for obvious reasons. I also excluded those listed as origin unknown or have other un-confirmable heritages.
Following that, one must have…(wait for it) an actual superpower to qualify. Sorry Forge, being a great engineer is not a superpower. Finally, I’m holding the requirement that the character in question must have had at least one spoken line; this is to weed out background janitor #7 from being counted.
Both AI’s listed some false information, thus I needed to manually fact-check it against the X-Men Wiki. Discounting duplicate names listed between CoPilot and Duck AI, I used the above-listed criteria and whittled it down to 14 qualifying characters across all of the Hollywood movies, official comic books, and the Marvel branded 90’s cartoon series.
The next step was to check the number of total X-men characters there were, regardless of race. There was disagreement between the two AI’s. CoPilot claimed that there were roughly 320, where Duck AI listed it as low as 150 characters with at least one spoken line of dialog. To appease the DEI crowd, I opted to use the Duck AI estimate in order to give the diverse X-Men the highest possible percentage of representation.
I didn’t make this shit up…
Now, it’s simply a matter of sixth-grade math. 14 diverse characters out of a total population of 150 gives us a paltry 9.3% of DEI representation. Keep in mind that 9.3% figure encompasses all non-white races. This means that despite being held up by leftist nerds as a hallmark of progress, the X-Men are 90.7% white.
For context, the X-Men are less racially diverse than the State of Maine, which is the least diverse in the nation. White NBA players, as a percentage of their population, are nearly twice as common as diverse X-Men. You’re more likely to find a female cop than you are a non-white X-Men. This whole notion that the X-Men support diversity is at best a hollow endorsement and at worst, an outright lie.
The worst part about this falsehood? It was never true. How do I know that? According to the 1960 US Census, the population was 88.6% White. Thus, the racial makeup of the X-Men in 2025 is still less diverse than pre-Civil Rights America. The execs at Marvel Studios must’ve skipped their mandatory DEI training seminar. One race having nearly 91% of the superpowers? Was it Stan Lee or Adolf Hitler who wrote these propaganda pamphlets comic books?
All of the praise Xavier gets for embracing minorities? Sounds like he Didn’t Earn It
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