I thought, since I don’t have a tumblr and you seem to be quite aware of race in MCU and willing to talk about it, I would just point out something about CACW I haven’t seen anyone mention – when Tony goes to visit Sam in the weird prison thing, Sam says Tony will need to bring a bad cop – ‘you’ll need to go Mark Fuhrman on my ass’ is the line. Idk if fandom is a little too young to get the reference or if ppl just didn’t hear it? Anyway, I thought it was interesting, if maybe a throwaway line
(2/2) The Fuhrman line is sort of interesting too bc (idk if you saw it) ‘The People Vs OJ Simpson’ brought Fuhrman back into the public consciousness recently – though possibly the CACW scene was filmed before the show aired
Haha friend I try to avoid painting a target on my back on the internet, but sure, let’s go with being aware of race in the MCU.
If anyone’s unfamiliar with the context of Fuhrman, he more or less torpedoed the prosecution of OJ Simpson by lying repeatedly on the stand about about horrifically racist statements he’d made between 1985 and 1994, as a consultant for a novelist writing a screenplay about the LAPD. Some “highlights” of the transcript are here, but let me caution you before clicking, it’s real, real bad. Fuhrman did make direct references to torturing black suspects on the tapes:
“Why don’t you give them the 77th lie detector test? You know, everybody–and a bunch of guys will laugh–old-timers, you know. And then one kid will ask his partner, ‘What’s that?’ You keep choking him out until he tells you the truth. You know it is kind of funny. But a lot of policemen will get a kick out of it. Anyway, so you are in the shadows like that. Now you’re–when you are talking to somebody it is not like you are really listening into their words because you’ll key on what is the truth and what isn’t. First thing, anything out of a n—–’s mouth for the first five or six sentences is a f—— lie. That is just right out. There has got to be a reason why he is going to tell you the truth.”
Fuhrman later pleaded no contest to charges of felony perjury, and served three years, and now is a regular guest on Fox News in stories involving (justifying) use of force by police officers.
The LAPD did conduct an investigation into Fuhrman’s claims of institutional racism and sexism, and found one of these things to be credible – but I’ll let the fact that anti-black police brutality is still a conversation we’re having literally twenty years later speak for itself.
So that is a super interesting reference for Sam to make. Not only is Sam drawing a direct comparison to Tony as a representative of a corrupt justice system, but a specifically anti-black one. Does that mean Sam thinks that the Accords are anti-black? Doubt it, but it shows the lens through which Sam sees the world: not just as a super hero, but as a black super hero. He doesn’t divorce himself from being a black man just because he puts on a bird suit. That’s a lot of complexity and characterization in an otherwise throwaway line.