‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ isn’t even out yet and racists are already complaining
A new Spider-Man animated series is swinging in next year. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will present Peter Parker (Hudson Thames) as a high-school-era Spidey contending with villains and problems on top of his schoolwork. It’s like the original Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, except with an intriguing twist… now Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) is Spider-Man’s mentor, not Tony Stark.
Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, is consistently one of the most popular villains in the Spider-Man mythos. But now a whole lot of people who claim to be Spider-Man fans are throwing their toys out of the pram simply because this version of Norman—one of a great many—is Black.
Yep, the same people who show up to comment “woke” and “DEI” on everything are now commenting on the Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man trailer with, well, “woke” and “DEI.” Not only is Norman Black, but his son Harry (Zeno Robinson) is as well, and people who probably don’t even care all that much about the characters are completely furious. Some are saying that changing Norman and Harry to Black contributes to “ginger erasure,” a so-called problem that is one hundred percent made up. “Getting real tired of all the racist raceswapping going on in comics, this is yet another historically ginger character replaced with a black one, it’s so tired at this point,” said one person, even though the Osborns’ hair color fluctuates from comic to comic and adaption to adaption.
This is exhausting to watch and it happens every time a Black person takes a role previously written as white. Look at what happened when Halle Bailey was cast to play Ariel in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid—she was abused online by racists. “As a Black person, you just expect it and it’s not really a shock anymore,” Bailey said in 2023. But that itself speaks to something very wrong with our current culture. And to make things even worse, it’s not even just when a Black actor plays a “white” role – Black people have been attacked for simply daring to be visible in popular franchises. Moses Ingram was subject to racist abuse when she played the villain in Obi-Wan Kenobi back in 2022, to the point where Disney had to release a statement supporting her.
Spider-Man promotes a message of unity. The cast of the comic book has grown over the years to include more diverse characters and this isn’t even the first time an animated adaption has changed the race of a important character—The Spectacular Spider-Man, which debuted in 2008, changed Liz Allan from a white blonde into a Latina. It’s absolutely ridiculous that people are throwing tantrums over some iconic characters being a different race in an adaption that was always going to do things differently. Still, if they’re storming off, we can safely say that the fandom is better off without them.
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