While I completely understand your viewpoint here, and it is absolutely not a comic I would share, because I’ll admit my interpretation could be incorrect, that’s not how I took it. I take it as an inversion of the white/black good/evil dichotomy. White magic is generally considered good, but is being weilded by a clearly and objectively evil person, whereas the black man is capable of withstanding and being unaffected by it means there is some kind of protection over him, to me speaking to the possibility of divine protection from white (read: evil) magic.
It may help that I’m also reading the word white as “hwite” and it makes the klansman look even more like an asshole, but it also creates a difference in my brain between “white magic” little w, as, like, good and righteous magic, and “White magic” big w, racially based shit magic wielded by racist shits.
I’m reading way too much into this because of a preexisting interest in magic systems, and a weird brain that likes to try to turn all soft magic systems into something I can define and understand. Lol. I also have a preexisting dislike of the idea of white/black magic in fantasy, and never use the terms in my own writing for exactly that reason. It’s the same problem with the idea of right/left politics. The human brain is pretty hardwired to think of one direction as good and the other as bad. Which one that is shifts culturally, but in the west right is good, left is bad (Dexter became a name we willingly give our children. Sinister became the word for evil, vice, scary things and danger). Superstition may be stupid and dumb, but our animal brains don’t realize that. Until we reach some enlightenment not yet achieved, people will associate the right with good, even when it’s proven time and again to be dangerous and evil. We are, afterall, dumb monkeys that figured out how to wear clothes and split the atoms. But we’re still just dumb monkeys.
Anyway… Tl:Dr, I read way too much into this, and took it as an inversion of the white/good trope.
While I completely understand your viewpoint here, and it is absolutely not a comic I would share, because I’ll admit my interpretation could be incorrect, that’s not how I took it. I take it as an inversion of the white/black good/evil dichotomy. White magic is generally considered good, but is being weilded by a clearly and objectively evil person, whereas the black man is capable of withstanding and being unaffected by it means there is some kind of protection over him, to me speaking to the possibility of divine protection from white (read: evil) magic.
It may help that I’m also reading the word white as “hwite” and it makes the klansman look even more like an asshole, but it also creates a difference in my brain between “white magic” little w, as, like, good and righteous magic, and “White magic” big w, racially based shit magic wielded by racist shits.
I’m reading way too much into this because of a preexisting interest in magic systems, and a weird brain that likes to try to turn all soft magic systems into something I can define and understand. Lol. I also have a preexisting dislike of the idea of white/black magic in fantasy, and never use the terms in my own writing for exactly that reason. It’s the same problem with the idea of right/left politics. The human brain is pretty hardwired to think of one direction as good and the other as bad. Which one that is shifts culturally, but in the west right is good, left is bad (Dexter became a name we willingly give our children. Sinister became the word for evil, vice, scary things and danger). Superstition may be stupid and dumb, but our animal brains don’t realize that. Until we reach some enlightenment not yet achieved, people will associate the right with good, even when it’s proven time and again to be dangerous and evil. We are, afterall, dumb monkeys that figured out how to wear clothes and split the atoms. But we’re still just dumb monkeys.
Anyway… Tl:Dr, I read way too much into this, and took it as an inversion of the white/good trope.
Yeah, no. The comic is saying that the racist won’t practice black magic because it has the word black in it. It’s not very deep.