I grew up enclosed in white racism. Reading “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and you” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. I was struck by how many of my childhood heroes are really just racist tropes. It took me decades to unlearn the messages I learned in my childhood.

I grew up loving Tarzan. I did not know that Tarzan came from a cultural response to the great boxer and fighter Jack Johnson who as a black man kept humiliating white challengers. You may know the phrase, the great white hope. Well he defeated them all. Hence the need for a white male hero to defeat all those Africans and apes. Remember those apes, they show up again in the next paragraph.

Then as the Black Power movements rose, the culture came up with a blockbuster to encourage all Whites to fear that Black Power. The Planet of the Apes – where white astronauts land on a planet run by apes (just another derogatory name for black people). I loved those movies.

Then in the 1970s when the idea of the slum, and of fear of powerful black men was running rampant, the new powerful white hero rose up from the streets of Philadelphia, Rocky.

I grew up with those figures. I enjoyed those movies. Yet I was clueless as to what the real message of those movies and figures were. Now, I know better, and maybe now you do as well.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 7/19/21