Matthew Yglesias writes that the new X-Men movie paints Magneto in a fairly favorable light, and that speculates as to why most of the non-white mutants ended up following him:
The film is a pretty serious departure from the conventional depiction in this regard, but it’s quite thoroughgoing. Magneto’s mutant pride attitude is in every way more admirable than Xavier’s preference for the closet, and Xavier’s political view that mutants and humans can coexist peacefully if mutants avoid provocations is directly contradicted by the events at the end of the film. When Xavier is trying to convince Magneto (and the audience) that Magneto’s more militant methods will cost innocent life he literally says—to a Holocaust survivor!—that “they were only following orders” and therefore their sins are forgivable.
The mutant pride message is a radical one. It’s too radical for those whose WASP male privilege in their non-mutant lives makes them instinctively want to identify with existing power structures. But a mutant who’s also a Jew, or a woman, or a racial minority, or has had blue or red skin all of his or her life doesn’t suffer from that kind of false consciousness and gets ahead of the curve.
Reihan Salam, who has previously drawn comparisons between Professor Xavier and Magneto and the dynamic between the Civil Rights/Black Power movement argues that:
I’ll just add that I think that while Charles Xavier comes across as a naive product of privilege, it is important to remember that Magneto’s mutant supremacy agenda is premised on a desire to hasten the extinction of homo sapiens sapiens. Moreover, Stryker’s stance, that the rise of mutantkind represents a grave danger to humanity, is not entirely unreasonable.
I understand that the X-Men’s creators intended Xavier and Magneto to be kind of analogues to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but the comparison doesn’t really fit. For one think, MLK was a pacifist, and Xavier clearly sees a role for violence in defense of mutants, or he wouldn’t have ended up putting together a team of incredibly powerful mutant superheroes and trained them to fight. Xavier’s view that mutants should be able to use force to defend themselves is actually more comparable to Malcolm X’s latter-day perspective, while Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants is more like Hamas–a group of people who respond to legitimate grievances with monstrous methods.
Stryker’s view that mutantkind represents a danger to humanity may be “rational” but I don’t think it’s reasonable–a real world Stryker might argue that the rising population of nonwhites poses a danger to the U.S. someday no longer being mostly white, and therefore nonwhites should all be killed. Stryker’s agenda is no less “supremacist” than Magneto, he’s just approaching it from the other side.
