Profiling

*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*

Matthew
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, if you’ve listened to our coverage of Green Lantern, at least the first two episodes that are out, you heard us talk about cops, whether these are space cops, and how that makes us feel about the show. Obviously, one of the many reasons there’s a lot of negative feeling, hostility, and concern about propaganda, as it’s often called in media today, is the idea of police profiling: looking at someone based on demographic assumptions and treating them differently because of it, subjecting them to more police attention, violating their rights in different ways, or creating situations that escalate into violence specifically because of a profile the police have drawn. Paul and I are going to talk today about this idea of profiling overall, because the fact is the police do it, and it’s not great when they do it, and often it’s really bad when they do it. We also do it all the time, though. One of the easiest places to see that is at the poker table, or really almost any time we’re in a competition and evaluating an opponent based on the profile we find in our heads. We do it all the time outside of that too. We do it when we meet people at work. Our friend introduces us to their romantic partner. We meet someone for a date, or we look at someone on a dating profile.

We’re profiling all the time, and it’s not necessarily bad all the time, but it’s certainly important to think about the consequences of it. Why is it bad so much of the time? What are the situations where it might not be so bad? What are the ways to mitigate it and to get us to think past the way our brains, as we talk about a lot on this podcast, love to find patterns and group people into things based on anything from the demographic information we think we can see about them, to their clothes, their accent, or anything like that? All of that counts as profiling. So, Paul, get us started. Give us your overview on this idea of profiling and how you feel about it.

Paul
Yeah, I think it’s complicated. I don’t think police racial profiling is particularly complicated, though. I think it just sucks. I think most of our listeners will agree with that. Maybe some won’t, that’s fine.

Matthew
I would just add, I think racial profiling is perhaps the one we see the most, and that gets the most problematic outcomes. But historically, economic profiling is also a huge problem for the police, and gender profiling too. Profiling based on, say, whether one teenager looks preppy and another looks goth or punk, they’re going to be treated very differently. All of that is bad. Racial profiling is probably the one that gets the most attention, for good reason, but I think all kinds of police demographic profiling are significantly problematic.

Paul
Yeah, for sure. That’s something I was going to get into at some point, that racial profiling isn’t the only profiling police do. The main reason I, and a lot of people, have a problem with it is that it’s a government agency that’s supposed to treat all people equally regardless of X, Y, and Z, and instead treats people unequally based on X, Y, and Z. There’s a separate question of whether it’s even effective, which I’ll talk about in the context of poker, without the implication that it necessarily applies to police profiling.

But also, just individually, you talked about profiling people, like crossing to the other side of the street when somebody’s coming toward you. Personally, I always cross to the other side, because I figure either they’re a threat to me, or they think I’m a threat to them. I’m a big guy, and I used to wear a trench coat all the time, so I’d think, I’ll just go to the other side and let them pass. It doesn’t matter who they are. Some people might think, “they’re crossing because of what I look like,” and that’s fine either way, but some people cross specifically because they don’t like how a person looks. Profiling people based on how they’re dressed is just as much a thing as any racial, gender, or other kind of profiling.

Matthew
As people who either were, or hung out with people who dressed in all black and wore a lot of black trench coats in the days both before and after the Columbine shooting, when that became sort of the marker of the “angry young man” in problematic ways, yeah, I totally get that.

Paul
Yeah, especially before that, but then afterward the public perception really changed. I still remember coming back from something with some friends in high school, some of whom weren’t even in high school, and somebody saying, “let the caked freaks sit together.” That was me and another goth kid. So I guess we were being profiled within our overall gothy group.

Matthew
I want to take us on a tangent here, in part because I want to resolve this somewhat, or at least get it bookmarked so we can move on to some of the other stuff you’re going to talk about. I like the ideas you brought up there, and one thing that comes to me is that we can talk about the accuracy of profiling, and that’s a whole other thing. But I do think profiling becomes more and more problematic the more power the person doing the profiling has.

And so the government, or the police, is incredibly problematic, because they’re supposed to guarantee everyone’s rights. A woman who sees me coming down the street and gets a little more nervous just because of male-female dynamics, is that profiling? Probably, yes. Am I bothered by it in anything like the same way? No, because, A, she doesn’t have the power to punish me because of that profile, and, B, she’s dealing with a level of threat awareness that I don’t have to have. That’s obviously a very specific example, but I think we can talk about it in terms of much wider things.

Paul
Yeah, for sure. Whereas if you’re a Black man walking down the street and that same woman calls the police because they think you look threatening, now that person, who doesn’t have a lot of power, is invoking an institution with a lot of power. So there’s a lot there. None of that’s the main thing I want to talk about, though. Specifically, there are two main ways people tend to profile in poker, and this is motivated basically by the profit motive: when you identify how your opponent plays, you can play against them more accurately. If somebody’s playing very well, there’s a fairly narrow range of approaches you can take to play well against them and not lose to them.

Whereas if somebody’s a weaker player, there are often a wide range of exploits available to you, where you can say, “I know what this person’s doing wrong, and I’m going to take advantage of that.” Being able to quickly identify whether someone’s a weaker or stronger player, whether they’re aggressive or passive, tight or loose, how they play, that immediately informs your approach. The faster you can identify somebody, the faster you can bucket them or profile them, the more quickly you can play effectively against them.

And there’s an extent to which this is somewhat necessary. You don’t necessarily have to be bucketing people all the time, but when you see somebody just call before the flop instead of raising as the first person to enter the pot, that’s usually a sign of a weaker player. So you should mark that person in your mind and basically attack them with bets and raises, because you have an idea of how you can get value from them. I can still see them as an individual, someone who’s going to do things unique to them and not exactly the way everybody in that overall profile behaves. But until I have that information, I’m going to say, “okay, they’re going to play like this generic type of player.” Whereas if I see somebody use particular bet sizes, I’ll think, “that’s the sign of somebody who’s clearly studied poker theory and knows what size to use here.”

An example would be overbetting, or betting exactly 40 percent of the pot. You think, “that’s not just some random number this person chose, they clearly have a thought-out strategy. I have an idea of what books they’ve read, what videos they’ve watched, what software tools they use, and as a result, I have an idea of how to play against them.” In online poker, people are basically trying to bucket most players into two categories: bad player and good player. They call them “fish” and “regs,” or regulars. Sometimes that can become very reductive, where when we don’t have any information beyond that, it’s logical to think, “okay, therefore I think you should play this way, because that profile plays a certain way, and they’re not going to bluff enough here, so you should fold your bluff catchers.” However, that bucketing and that dichotomy can keep a lot of players from actually having open eyes and seeing people as individuals. I’m not that worried about whether an online poker player is going to be recognized as a full human individual when we’re just playing online, unless you’re chatting a bunch of hate speech, that’s a different story. We’re just playing poker. But that can inhibit good decision-making if that kind of profiling has blinded someone to all the data. “Okay, this is this type of fish, but actually they do this particular thing, and now that I know that, I can make more fine adjustments and treat them like an individual.”

Matthew
If I can jump in, there are a couple of ways I can see this going wrong. First, if we just go based on one data point. Especially in online poker, there are so many times where misclicks happen, people click the wrong button, or they forget they’ve microwaved something and fold the situation away, or they time out, or they have what’s often referred to as a “timing tell,” where they take an awfully long time to make a decision. It seems to me that this, especially, is a good example of a much broader lesson: taking one data point, even if it’s pretty clearly “they did this thing, and this group of people does that thing,” if the next five times they don’t do that thing but you still have them marked in green on your online format, there’s a real problem there.

Paul
Yeah, exactly. For instance, open-limping, where somebody just calls before the flop instead of raising when they’re first in, is a sign that somebody’s probably a weak player. There are a few really good players who do that on purpose in very specific situations. Also, very strong players occasionally misclick. If you see someone do it one time and mark them, and then never consider any other data, that’s going to be a mistake. Also, not automatically reloading to the maximum buy-in is often a sign of a weaker player, but some decent players don’t have that enabled, and sometimes the software just breaks and doesn’t auto-top them up, and then somebody’s playing with fewer chips. These things happen, so it’s really important not to, and this is true with anything in life, evaluate someone by the single worst thing they’ve ever done, or judge them in their entirety based on it. You can think, “that was an absolutely horrible thing to do,” fine, but that doesn’t mean that’s the entirety of who they are. Similarly, just because somebody does one act of philanthropy doesn’t mean they’re necessarily overall a great person. People can change, and one action doesn’t necessarily represent the entirety of someone’s being. That’s a way things can go wrong and get really oversimplified in online poker.

I don’t think it’s super problematic, but sometimes people look at the country somebody’s playing in and think, “this country is mostly good players because it’s a poor country and there aren’t a lot of rich people with money to gamble off,” or, “there are tons of fish from this country.” So you see somebody with this flag or that flag, and maybe you weight them accordingly. I find that mildly problematic just because of how it ties in with the way people discriminate against and judge each other outside of poker. But if it’s online and you’re just using it for your own personal sense of “I’m going to weight this way or that,” they’re more likely to be like this or that, fine. The times I have a real problem with it are when people are playing live poker.

Matthew
With the online thing, I’d say that to some extent, if your prejudice is making you play badly, I’m not too bothered by that.

Paul
I mean, sometimes it is like that, in terms of its effect on your play, sure.

Matthew
It’s not always going to economically punish you, and random things can happen. But having your prejudice reaffirmed isn’t great. To me, it becomes especially problematic when it’s actually deepening it or causing it. I’ve certainly seen, in the online poker world, a lot of concern about bots right now, and there has been frankly since the beginning, but it’s gotten worse with AI and things like that. Every now and then, when I’m reading some discussion, and I’m working myself up to quitting the amount of political discourse I get into on Twitter, I’m not there yet, I have to figure out what the patch is for that brand of nicotine, but when I dive into conversations about AI lately, I see a lot of very anti-Chinese conversation about Chinese bots being used against us, in ways where I think there’s some degree of reality involved, but also a great degree of racism and xenophobia taking some degree of truth and exaggerating it, because lots of countries use bots to hurt other countries, the United States very much included. Every now and then I’ll see someone say, “yeah, no, you’re right, Chinese bots are screwing us all over, I play against Chinese bots all the time,” in online poker, and it’s clear that someone probably just lost once or twice to a player who’d marked themselves as Chinese, and has let that, or just seeing those players a lot, turn into some psychological reasoning about why Chinese players might be more likely to play in more rigid ways or something like that.

There are a million ways you could take that conversation, but my point is that when you’re using what you’re seeing at the poker table and connecting it to nationality in pretty tenuous ways, and then making it an argument about that nationality and that country outside of the poker table, now we’re in real trouble.

Paul
The last time I was paying attention to anything online, it was Russian bots that were the whole thing, something about election interference and so on. But it’s not just what someone’s thinking, it’s how they’re communicating it to other people. For instance, people often use very denigrating language to describe different types of players. There’s a popular streamer who refers to really tight players as “stains,” which I think is honestly kind of disgraceful. I’m just like, what’s wrong with you? But whatever, it’s designed, I guess, mostly for entertainment purposes, I’m not sure. But then people are talking about Chinese players being very tight, and they combine those two things and say, “Chinese people are stains,” and I think, this is not a good sentence for you to construct. This isn’t from somebody I’ve thought of as being very racist, or someone who even thought about it that way necessarily, English isn’t their first language, but it’s a deeply offensive sentence. Basically, they’re trying to say people from a particular country, on average, play tighter than people from other countries. There are bot farms, that’s real, and they operate in different places, often somewhere less likely to have legal ramifications. But it’s a reminder to pay attention to the language you’re using, and when you’re talking poorly about a group of people because of their poker play, try to make sure you’re not associating that with some demographic factor, because even if that’s not really what you mean or deeply believe, communicating it that way reinforces someone else’s racial or gender prejudice.

Matthew
I think this is something you probably see most often in poker, since it’s one of the most prevalent online games there is, with a lot of attention on it, but it’s by no means the only one. Certainly in online Magic: The Gathering spaces, this has definitely been an issue, somewhat racially, but especially around gender and misogyny. I think more and more it’s getting called out, and there have been people who were known as official streamers, with connections to Magic, who’ve lost that status because of it. So there’s some institutional response, at least, but it’s still a real problem: someone plays against a player with a female name, and there’s an assumption from the start that they’re not going to be a good player, so if they make plays that aren’t perceived as optimal, there’s no grace given, no “maybe they have a strategy I just don’t know about.” It’s just, “chicks can’t play Magic,” that kind of stuff.

Or, if they do play well, the number of times people submit examples of their online play as proof that it’s a bot or that they’re cheating. The number of times the opponent has a name people perceive as belonging to a female player is probably a lot higher than the actual number of female players out there. I’m sure it’s happened in online chess too, and in a lot of these things. It applies across the board.

Paul
Yeah, online chess, definitely. When I first opened my chess.com account, it was early 2012, and I was living in Germany for a while, so I had a German flag on my account. Eventually I removed it, because I hadn’t been in Germany for a long time, and I put up an international flag instead, like, “don’t give me a flag on my account.” People definitely talk about that kind of stuff. Somebody was talking trash about Nazis and Hitler, and I’m just thinking, we’re just playing online chess. I generally try not to make assumptions about the gender of my opponent, and sometimes you’re just playing a bot anyway. But, pro tip, turn the chat off.

Just do it, you know. And in poker, sometimes you want to turn it back on, to see, okay, are they tilting, did they just take a bad beat, are they spewing a bunch of stuff. It’s like, yeah, okay, I’ll turn it back off. So that’s the online domain, and there’s a lot of ugliness there, a lot of bullying and awful things. That’s bad, and I don’t want to play that down. But I think it gets worse when it comes to live poker, and that’s kind of where I first noticed it more, because I never really thought about it much playing online, like, what country someone’s from is kind of just whatever, mostly. But in live poker, people will cite gender, race, nationality, whether somebody had an accent, and age, as if these are legitimate reads, when you’re literally sitting at the table with a person.

Single-tabling, playing one table, online you have to look for markers because you’re playing four, six, eight, twenty-four tables, and you need to quickly identify people. You don’t get to see the person. Live, people think, “oh, I can see the person, so I’m going to judge them based on all these demographic factors.” Maybe there’s some correlation, but I’ve never seen data, and online, all of these reads are based on data from hundreds of millions of hands, filtered and observed for tendencies. Whereas live, it’s people just saying, “this type of person bluffs a lot, this type of person plays really tight,” and I’d rather just see how they stack their chips if I’m going to profile them, see how they carry themselves at the table, see how they put their money in the pot, what their bet sizes are. As soon as somebody’s played one hand of poker, you have more useful information than from all of those demographic factors combined, and yet, because those demographic factors are so obvious, and you’re dealing directly with other humans, as opposed to through the sort of window of the internet where you’re not actually in contact with people, there’s so much more possibility for bad things to come out of it. That’s why live poker profiling, to me, is where it’s super problematic, because people act like these assumptions are just obviously correct. It’s like, show me the data if you really want to make that case, when there’s so much information available to you about how somebody’s actually playing poker.

Matthew
And again here, I think the fact that if your biases are making you make stupid decisions that give more money to the people you’re biased against, again, that’s not my biggest concern. A lot of times it’s not that, like, a woman is at the table and people have sexist ideas about how good women are, and thus that woman wins more money, although there are definitely women able to take advantage of that. But it’s also that if every interaction you have with a woman player is about the fact that she’s a woman player, that’s pretty shitty, and it’s going to make that person pretty uncomfortable. That’s a reason people have said, certainly in Magic and other online and in-person gaming spaces, that women are often happier playing online rather than in person, because of things that happen all the time at, say, Friday Night Magic at a game store, something we’ve really tried to get people to stop doing in judging. But I’ve also seen it at poker tables, and I’ve been guilty of it myself in both places before I really understood the problem with it: someone sits down at a Magic night, you start talking to them, and you say, “oh, are you here with your boyfriend?” Similarly, at poker tables, I’ve seen, “oh cool, you’re playing poker, is your husband at a higher table?” or something like that. Some of that idea, that’s just an example of people not just profiling someone but making assumptions on top of it, like, “you enjoy poker, but you’re only here because there’s a man in your life who likes it a lot more, and you’re along for the ride.” That’s one very specific example of something that can be much broader, but it definitely creates an uncomfortable feeling, and you’re reaffirming misogyny, racism, sexism, ageism, whatever it is. That’s bad in itself, but it also just makes you a jerk to the people at the table with you.

Paul
Yeah, for sure. I think anything where a person isn’t seeing another person as a person, but as a representative of a group, is always problematic. Treating them that way makes things worse. To me, a big part of the problem is, I agree with you, if somebody wants to make a bad demographic read and think, “I’ll just keep bluffing her because she can’t call down,” or whatever, fine, you make your own bad decisions, whatever’s going on in your mind, I don’t think it’s great, but whatever. To me, it’s really the conversation around it, where these things are spoken as if they’re facts, and whether or not they’re true, the fact that they go along with people’s prejudices and play off the same biases people already have, instead of moving away from them, that’s the issue. It’s fine to have biases, everybody has some, everybody’s own experience gives them a particular view on reality, and that’s okay. But it’s important to acknowledge that, to try to assess what’s going on in your own head with that stuff, what biases you have and which direction they go, because some people don’t have the common biases and might have others instead. But then to acknowledge that and not do things that double down on them or exacerbate them, don’t act like they’re useful to you. If anything, you should be moving in the opposite direction.

And trying not to make decisions based on that. Even if somebody convinced me there was some significant utility in these types of reads, which I don’t actually believe there is, I’m sure that if you take one group and another group and check the stats, they’re not going to be identical across all groups, no doubt. But that doesn’t mean everybody’s assumptions about that actually contain some level of wisdom, or that they’re accurate. It just means there probably are biases this way and that way that happen to go along with this group or that group. But the idea that that’s super useful, and that you don’t have vastly superior information just by looking at how people actually play, is ridiculous. The fact that there’s all this conversation around it, that it’s one of the first things people want to know when they hear about a live poker hand, there’s so much better information to be digging into. Why are we talking about this? It’s really doubling down on biases that most people have and that aren’t desirable, so why don’t we just move away from that?

Matthew
I think part of it is that growing up, and I think part of this is the change in our culture, but part of it is also just, I agree with all of that, and where I get stuck is that you’re stating as a fact that these biases are bad and we should want to get over them. I fully agree, and I do think it’s factual, there’s no actual benefit to these biases. I think part of the issue is that we’re in a world where nowhere near as many people as I’d want agree with that statement. To some extent, we used to act as a society as though everyone agreed with that statement. There were always people who didn’t, but they kept it a lot more hidden, or they couldn’t find each other, so they may have felt more isolated.

There are a million reasons that’s not as true anymore, but some of it was that those of us who weren’t the victims of these biases weren’t seeing them, and thus assumed they weren’t there. I certainly never felt profiled by the cops, except one time in Northern Ireland, where maybe my red hair got me profiled, but even then, I was aware of it because Black friends of mine had been talking to me about it happening in a way I hadn’t seen myself.

Paul
Yeah, and I did get profiled, for the record, by police, but that was because I was wearing a trench coat.

Matthew
Yeah, like I said, you know—

Paul
—not racial profiling, but yeah.

Matthew
I mean, you know, all those kinds of things can happen.

Paul
But like, “you’re too tall to be in high school.” I’m thinking, what are you talking about? Oh my god, that’s great.

Matthew
Tying it back to superhero stuff, I think this also becomes something to be really aware of in the media we watch, how often the characters, but also the directors, are using the fact that we, as audience members, are going to profile the things we see on screen. I’ve been rewatching the Spider-Man movies, partly because of the new one that came out, and looking at some other stuff, Tony Stark absolutely profiles Peter Parker on the basis of age. There are a lot of mistakes Peter makes that other people Tony Stark is dealing with, as new superheroes, especially Ant-Man, aren’t held to nearly as hard a standard for. What’s the role of profiling in that, and in the way audiences are so much stricter on what they expect of women superheroes, women Jedi, Black superheroes, people of color, or whatever? That’s absolutely profiling at work, and that can just be on the audience side. But also, and we’re getting a little better at this, if you wanted to convince someone a street kid was bad news and dangerous, you made him Black. If you wanted to convince someone somebody was dealing drugs, especially cocaine, you made them Latino. We’ve moved away from a lot of that, certainly not all of it, but the fact that the Chitauri look an awful lot like a coded version of dreadlocked, dark-skinned people, that’s not a coincidence.

Paul
Yeah. Or the Predator too, I think.

Matthew
Yeah, the Predator, I think, also looks kind of Rasta-coded in that regard.

Paul
Yeah. I think these things can be used to negative effect. I mean, the Lord of the Rings, that’s a tough one.

It’s a tough one. But sometimes they can be used, where you can play on what you think the audience is going to assume in order to subvert expectations. I almost feel like that had a lifespan, though. There’s a character, I don’t want to spoil it, the show’s twenty years old, but there’s a show with one or two Black characters, and that character ends up seeming very suspicious, so a lot of the audience might naturally assume, because of their prejudices, that the character is up to no good. I actually had a friend watching it who said, “you know, they’re not going to make the one Black guy the bad guy, right? Are they really going to do that?” They didn’t. It turned out they were subverting expectations. That’s one of my favorite characters and shows, and I won’t tell you what it is, because I don’t want to spoil it. That kind of thing happens elsewhere too, where people assume a certain character is going to be male, and it turns out to be a female character, or somebody who’s likely to be overlooked for whatever reason, sometimes racial reasons. I think that’s the kind of thing where you can use implicit profiling against the audience, where it’s like, “they’re going to assume this, and we’re going to subvert that.” I think once that gets done a certain number of times, it loses a little bit of its punch, and maybe there are some not-great aspects to it, but I kind of appreciate it, because it’s like letting the audience make bad assumptions and then saying, “look what you did.” There’s comedy that does that too, where you’ll see someone who looks like they’re going to be really threatening, and they turn out to be some really sweet person, and you think, “oh, okay, I got that wrong.”

Matthew
I remember when I was a kid, people liked to tell each other logic brain teasers, figure this thing out. One of the ones told most often, that stumped me, because I had bad instincts, and I think it stumped a lot of people of my generation, and today I think it doesn’t stump people as much, which is a sign of generations getting better about these things, and society getting better about these things, was this: a man and his son are out for a drive, they get in a terrible accident, the father is killed, the son is rushed to the hospital, the doctor goes to operate and says, “I can’t operate, that’s my son.” People would get stumped, working through, “is there a stepfather involved? What do we mean by death?” The answer is just that the doctor is his mother.

Paul
But that’s not necessarily the answer.

Matthew
Well, that’s the answer I’ve heard most often. What else have you heard?

Paul
Well, it could be his other father.

Matthew
Yeah, oh, that’s another good one.

Paul
It’s gone through different iterations depending on people’s assumptions.

Matthew
That’s a good one. I wasn’t even considering that as another possibility.

Paul
Or a non-binary parent, or whatever it is.

Matthew
I think that’s such a great example, and yeah, movies have definitely used that. I think that can become its own kind of thing, too. Women have talked about this in terms of, when you want to subvert the idea that the woman is going to be the damsel in distress, so every woman has to be really, really strong and awesome. And then it’s like, no, you can’t just have that either, so every woman character suddenly has to be really strong but very flawed, and almost always has the exact same flaw, a hard shell but a soft interior. Whatever it is, to tie it back to poker and to media, as we’ve talked about, in a game like poker, or in Magic, or in chess, or anything like that, if you know people are going to stereotype you in certain ways, and that they think they can exploit a weakness in your game because of your demographics, playing that up so they’ll try it, and then you can exploit them, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable strategy within that framework. When I was a young player and I knew I was going to be seen as hyper-aggressive, I would make the times I was being overaggressive very obvious, in an attempt to trap people with that. I’ve certainly known women who intentionally wear more low-cut outfits, or act a little more flighty and giggly at the table, because it plays into that. But it is playing into a stereotype, and the question becomes how much you’re reaffirming it in the process, what the individual responsibility is versus the overall responsibility.

At a poker table, I’m probably the least likely person to judge that, but I think it’s an open question. As you get into bigger things, though, I think there’s an idea that if you can only tell a woman’s story by making her a stereotype or by making her specifically not a stereotype, guess what, the story is still about her being a stereotype. Same with, if every story about a Black man is about a Black man who isn’t a drug dealer, we’re still associating Black people with drug dealing all the time, and that becomes its own problem.

Paul
Yeah, make your story about a person and let them be a person. I had very mixed feelings about Shang-Chi, when I found out he was going to be the Asian superhero in Marvel, because I thought, really, he’s going to be a kung fu guy? Don’t make him an accountant either, but could he not just be, like, a stretchy guy or something? It felt so on the nose. I really liked the movie, though, I think it was great in terms of increasing representation and everything. Tony Leung was amazing in it, Simu Liu was great too. But my favorite Asian Marvel character is—

Matthew
—the agent, is it Woo?

Paul
It’s Randall Park, right, whoever he’s playing.

Matthew
He’s been in the Ant-Man movies, and now he’s become kind of like the Marvel equivalent of the actress from the Thor movies, popping up in a bunch of things.

Paul
Yeah, and he’s just a guy who happens to be Asian. He’s not a superhero, or at least he wasn’t going to be, just an agent or whatever, but being able to have a character who just happens to be part of a group, that doesn’t mean I’m against having a movie like Black Panther, where the character’s Blackness is a big part of the character. I’m not against that. I’m not against having a character like Shang-Chi. But when all of the characters who aren’t white guys have movies that are about whatever their racial, gender, or other identity is, it feels like that’s a problem. Maybe you can say Captain America’s race and gender are kind of part of the picture too, originally, I mean Steve Rogers, though it obviously doesn’t have to be. But Tony Stark could be anyone, you know what I mean.

Matthew
I want to come back to a more general thing, but just on the Steve Rogers point, one of the topics we talk about all the time is authenticity to the source material. I think one of the ways that becomes important to talk about is asking how a character was profiled at the time they were written, and how that would change now. I think it’s pretty clear Jack Kirby would have loved to make Captain America Jewish, but that just wasn’t going to fly, so he made him something fairly close, Brooklyn Catholic, and probably Irish Catholic. That was never explicitly said, but there are so many things about him, especially being from Brooklyn, that point in that direction, and that in the thirties, forties, and fifties would have read as, “this is not quite Mr. All-American, Protestant, WASP boy.” That’s totally lost today, and I think that’s an important question to think about when you’re modernizing characters like that.

Pulling it back, though, as a positive example, I know it’s not your favorite movie, but in the James Gunn Superman, one of my favorite characters, and I think a great example of doing this right, is Mister Terrific, because he’s a Black man who’s very much a geek. He’s absolutely brilliant, and his superpowers are completely based on his ability to be an inventor and to be very scientific. The thing is, that’s playing against a Black stereotype, but often the way people try to do that is by making the character a geek, someone who never seems like they’ve “been to the cookout,” making them not that stereotype by making them another one instead.

Paul
Yeah, they make sure he’d never quote a rap lyric, that he wouldn’t be “street” in that way, that he’s very much a nerd. Mister Terrific isn’t that. He looks like the kind of person you’d stereotype in the other direction, but he’s actually a huge nerd, without losing the part of his Blackness. It’s a little complex to untangle, but I think you can see the point I’m making. He just felt like an individual person, whose Blackness and maleness and intelligence were all part of him, without any of them having to play against a stereotype. He was just a person. That’s both why I’m so thrilled they made him a character, and why I, and a lot of people who talk about racism in comic books and comic book movies, are so baffled that there’s been nothing done with him since. There’s been this ongoing campaign about comics being “so white,” and DC hadn’t had a prominent Black character for a while, and one of the pushes was, “give us a Mister Terrific line of comics after that movie,” because there would have been huge interest in the character. Nothing came of it.

I can’t speak to DC Comics or anything since the Superman movie, but I’ll say, even back in the Justice League animated series, Mister Terrific wasn’t a big character, but he had a similar kind of vibe, not defined by his race, but also not defined in contrast to whatever stereotypes. I’d be happy to see more of the character. I think there was a version in Arrow as well. That’s unfortunate, that they haven’t gone further with it. I haven’t watched the Green Lantern show yet, but I certainly hope John Stewart is in it. Maybe he does fit some stereotypes in a way, but I never felt like he was a character who was really defined by them.

Matthew
I think, without getting too far into spoilers, it’s mixed so far. There are some really good signs, he’s a great character, though they’ve changed a couple of things about his background that aren’t fantastic. I think the writers are very aware of these questions in ways I’m really liking so far. We just did an episode with Jessica Plummer on that, so check that out.

Paul
There was one thing, in response to what you were saying earlier, about essentially taking advantage of other people profiling you, from maybe a more poker-adjacent story: there was the book Bringing Down the House, which was adapted into the movie 21. The movie 21 took a bunch of Asian characters and made them white, which, aside from that just not generally being a great thing to do (I think it’s sometimes more complicated than people make it out to be, but on average, probably don’t do that), specifically overlooked that, in the book, the characters, who are based on real people, are mostly Asian, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not just that they went to MIT and there are a lot of Asian students at MIT. It’s because, in the casinos, in blackjack, they were the card counters, which is completely legal. There’s nothing illegal about counting cards, but casinos don’t want you to do it. Casinos offer the game of blackjack, which a player can beat if they count cards effectively and modulate their betting based on the count. If you do that, the casino will either politely ask you to stop playing, or forcefully keep you from playing.

For a long time, the stereotypical card counter was more like a middle-aged white guy, and casinos knew this, so they knew who to look out for. They’d think, “this doesn’t look like somebody who should have tons of money,” so it really sticks out like a sore thumb when someone who doesn’t fit that image is card counting. What the MIT Blackjack Team did was set up a scheme where some players would sit and play normally while counting, then signal someone who would come in and bet really big, like a big gambler. They didn’t have to be Asian, but most of the ones who came in and did what the team called “gorilla betting,” betting really big while still counting but not modulating their bets much, were Asian, and the idea was that they’d be perceived, with a backstory that they were the kids of some rich guy from Hong Kong or somewhere, so the casinos would think, “oh, this is just a whale, they’re very lucky.” They were essentially exploiting the fact that the casinos would see them through their own stereotypes, and not recognize them as people who kept winning. Eventually the casinos figured it out, because of all their surveillance, but the movie made the whole team a bunch of white kids, and it missed that entire aspect of the story. Hollywood being Hollywood, basically.

Matthew
It’s one of those weird things, because I feel like one of the problems that happens is kind of like what I was talking about with the way female superheroes are portrayed. We can’t make them femme fatales all the time anymore, so we swing to this other extreme instead. I feel like a lot of times people point out racism issues, and Hollywood tries to fix it in incredibly clumsy ways.

Paul
Yeah, for sure. I’ll be honest, if I saw fifteen seconds of an ad for a movie about a bunch of math-whiz kids who use their skills to beat blackjack, and you told me they were all Asian, I’d think, wow, that sounds racist as hell. But then you tell me, actually, no, it’s based on a true story, and the fact that they’re Asian was part of the point. Even if it wasn’t, let’s say the real story was a white professor at MIT thinking, “I need a bunch of math-whiz kids, but also kids who are less ethical and more willing to cheat—”

Matthew
“—so I should get a bunch of Asians.” Guess what, his racism has to be an important part of that story. If you change those kids to white kids, you lose that entirely. Either way, I’d guarantee that at some Hollywood meeting, someone said, “we shouldn’t have them all be Asian kids, because people will call our movie racist,” and I imagine somebody else said, “oh, good, because white actors will actually sell a lot more.”

Paul
That’s the one. I’ll grant you maybe someone said the first thing, but someone definitely said the second thing, or it was so assumed by everyone involved that it didn’t even need to be said out loud.

Matthew
So, I profile you as someone who has a lot of things to do and doesn’t want to spend too much more time on this. Any other last comments, questions, or things you wanted to bring up?

Paul
No, I think we covered pretty much the points I was thinking about.

Matthew
Yeah, I think me too. I think it’s been a good conversation. I think, like a lot of others we’ve had, this is something we’re going to probably refer back to a lot, because it matters a great deal. We didn’t really even get into thinking about all the ways we do profile people, and how, again, part of it is that our brains love patterns, and a lot of times profiles make sense in certain ways. There’s a whole other question, too, of how, in a world right now where “ACAB” is fundamentally a profiling statement—

Paul
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there’s a lot of value to it, and I think there’s especially value the more danger you’re in from the cops. But it’s like, how does that change things, and all that kind of stuff.

Matthew
So yeah, big topic, we’ll get into it more, I’m sure. But Paul, thank you so much for being a part of this. Paul, where can people find more of your stuff?

Paul
Yeah, you can find my stuff at zenmadman.com. You can use the code SHE400 if you want to buy any of my book-type things, fiction or nonfiction. I’m just Zen Madman at spots throughout the web, also known as Paul Christopher Hoppe on book covers.

Matthew
Definitely check out Paul’s writing, great column. You can find, as he said, a bunch of the columns put together in a book you can buy through the show notes. You get a discount using our show code, and a little bit of money comes back to the podcast, so everybody wins. Please check that out. Please also check out all the writings of Pete Wright, frequent guest and one of the hosts of our podcast network, who’s written some great books. But most importantly, please think about all the things we’ve said, and please keep the feedback coming. We’d love to hear what you think. And may the Force be with you.