Superman Was Always an Immigrant: How America's Superheroes Became Culture War Targets
As conservatives rage over calling Superman an "immigrant," they're recycling Nazi attacks from 1940. America has spent 90 years attacking heroes who embody its stated values.
This week, “Superman” director James Gunn called the Man of Steel an "immigrant" and suggested his story centers on "basic human kindness." Within hours, conservative pundits were branding the new film "Superwoke," with Jesse Watters joking that Superman's cape now reads "MS-13" and Kellyanne Conway taking cheap shots at star David Corenswet's "Russian Jewish" surname.
If this manufactured outrage feels familiar, that's because America has been here before. From Nazi newspapers attacking Superman's Jewish creators to MAGA crowds losing their minds over a Black Captain America, bigots have always turned on their heroes the moment they reflect real American values.
First, let's be clear about what makes Superman an immigrant. Kal-El was born on the planet Krypton and sent to Earth as an infant refugee when his home world was destroyed. He crash-landed in rural Kansas, where he was found and adopted by Martha and Jonathan Kent, without any legal documentation, technically making him an undocumented alien. They raised him as Clark Kent, giving him the values and identity that would shape him into Superman. His entire origin story is about an immigrant child being welcomed by a loving American family and growing up to protect his adoptive home.
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Nazi Germany Attacks Superman's Creators
In 1940, Superman was only two years old when the Third Reich decided he was a threat to fascism. Das Schwarze Korps, the official SS newspaper, devoted an entire page to denouncing the "American comic strip Superman" and concluded that "the Superman's creator is a Jew." Both creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitism. The Nazis called Siegel a "Koloradokafer", the German word for crop-destroying beetles, playing into centuries-old antisemitic tropes about Jews as vermin.
The SS was particularly enraged by Superman's appearance in Look magazine, where he single-handedly destroyed Germany's West Wall fortifications and dragged both Hitler and Stalin to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
After defeating the Nazis, Superman didn't retire to his Fortress of Solitude. In the 1940s radio serial "The Adventures of Superman," he turned his attention to another group of costumed villains terrorizing American communities: the Ku Klux Klan. These episodes, chronicled in the recent podcast "Superman vs. the KKK," featured the Man of Steel systematically dismantling white supremacist organizations while teaching young listeners that prejudice was un-American.
One particularly powerful storyline had Superman surrounded by children of all races, telling them: "Remember, there are people in this world who try to make you believe that some people are better than others because of the color of their skin, or the place their parents were born, or the religion they practice. Don't you ever let anyone tell you that! It's un-American and it's wrong!"
Superman's creators explicitly designed him as an antidote to the "superior race" mythology that was tearing the world apart. Jerry Siegel told the BBC in 1981 that Superman was his response to fascism. "I felt that the world desperately needed a crusader, if only a fictional one... a very clean-cut guy who could have ruled the world, and is all-powerful, but instead he uses his powers to aid the helpless and the deserving rather than to exploit them."
Recent Conservative Attacks on on Marvel Heroes
If Superman's immigrant status makes conservatives uncomfortable, Captain America's evolution should keep them awake at night. Created by Jewish artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1940, Cap was punching Hitler on comic book covers a full year before America entered World War II. His first issue showed him fighting American fascists, the Nazi-supporting German American Bund that was holding rallies in Madison Square Garden.
When Steve Rogers passed his shield to Sam Wilson, a Black man, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the racist backlash was immediate and telling. Social media exploded with complaints about "DEI hires" and "woke disasters," ignoring the fact that Sam Wilson had been Captain America in the comics since 2014.
In "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," the show introduced Isaiah Bradley, a Black super-soldier who had fought for America during the Korean War, only to be imprisoned, experimented on, and erased from history by the same government he served. The parallel to real Black veterans' experiences wasn't subtle, and neither was the conservative outrage. Suddenly, a character created to fight American fascists was being attacked by American fascists for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, America hadn't always lived up to its ideals.
Marvel's recent "woke" controversies reveal how effectively these stories hold up a mirror to American society. When "Black Panther" became a cultural phenomenon, the same voices now attacking Superman complained about "reverse racism" and "anti-white propaganda", despite the film celebrating African culture and technological advancement. When "Captain Marvel" featured a female protagonist, the backlash included organized review-bombing campaigns and accusations that Brie Larson was "man-hating."
The aforementioned "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" also explicitly addressed how a Black man might feel about carrying the shield of a country that enslaved his ancestors. "Ms. Marvel" featured a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager navigating her identity in post-9/11 America. "She-Hulk" dared to suggest that women face different challenges than men in professional settings.
Each of these shows sparked the same accusations of "going woke", calls for boycotts, and claims that Marvel was "ruining" beloved characters. But these weren't departures from Marvel tradition—they were continuations of it. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and their collaborators had always used superheroes to explore social issues, from the X-Men as an allegory for the civil rights movement to Spider-Man's working-class struggles in New York.
The Recurring Pattern of Attacking American Heroes
The current Superman backlash exposes the fundamental contradiction in American mythology. The same people who worship at the altar of immigration success stories—the idea that America is a nation of immigrants who came here for a better life—lose their minds when Superman embodies that exact narrative. They love the abstract concept of the American Dream but hate seeing it represented by an actual immigrant, even a fictional one.
James Gunn's Superman doesn't even engage in explicit political activism. He stops wars, saves civilians, and tries to minimize collateral damage. If basic human decency and a preference for non-violent solutions constitute "woke propaganda," then the problem is with the people complaining about him.
Superman showing kindness to refugees, or Captain America questioning government overreach, or Black Panther celebrating African excellence doesn't actually change these characters at all. They reveal what these characters have always been, and what America claims to be but often fails to become.
What This Reveals About America
Every generation gets the heroes it deserves, but also the villains it creates. The Nazis who attacked Superman's creators in 1940 saw exactly what modern conservatives see: a threat to their white supremacist worldview wrapped in red, blue, and hope.
America faces a choice now. Will we embrace the values our heroes actually represent, or will we attack them for holding up an uncomfortable mirror? Will we celebrate Superman's immigrant story, or will we side with the same voices that have been trying to silence it for nearly a century?
Ultimately, Superman's greatest power is his ability to make people reveal who they really are. The current backlash is about America's ongoing struggle to live up to the ideals its own mythology demands. And just like in 1940, the people attacking Superman are telling us exactly who they are.
The only question is whether we're brave enough to listen.
But here's the grim reality: the forces trying to erase Superman's immigrant story are accelerating.
Disney is already backing down from stories that center marginalized communities, and comic book publishers are self-censoring to avoid boycotts.
The reality is stark: we need independent voices documenting these erasure campaigns before they succeed completely.
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👥 At 20% paid subscribers: We could develop educational resources showing how Superman, Captain America, and the X-Men were created as direct responses to real-world oppression, for schools where teaching accurate comic book history is becoming controversial.
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References
Breznican, Anthony. "Can Superman Win the Culture War?" Vanity Fair, July 11, 2025.
Baragona, Justin. "'Superwoke': Fox News rages that new Superman film has 'pro-immigrant themes'." The Independent, July 8, 2025.
Adams, Sam. "The New Superman Movie Has an Unlikely Inspiration—and It's Not Superman." Slate, July 13, 2025.
Brown, Tracy. "'Superman' isn't superwoke. Why the backlash is overblown." Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2025.
Huppke, Rex. "I saw the new liberal 'Superman' movie and it gave me the woke mind virus." USA TODAY, [date].
Hassenger, Jesse. "Superman is super woke? How politics play into the new man of steel." The Guardian, July 12, 2025.
Rose, Steve. "'Another woke disaster from Hollywood!' How Captain America joined the culture wars." The Guardian, February 14, 2025.
LaMarca, Livia. "Marvel has always been political." The Pitt News, February 2, 2024.
This was great. Thanks for sharing.
Well superman is a cartoon character so if anybody is upset they should get a damn life