Take Me to Little Africa!

Today’s WTF moment, from boingboing:

There’s apparentely a Superman comic from the 1970s in which Lois Lane is turned into a black woman in order to get information for a story she’s working on.

Seriously.

“The story begins with Lois assigned to do a story on Metropolis’s urban area that Lois refers to Little Africa. It seems that all black people refuse to submit to an interview done by Miss Whitey. Young children, old blind ladies, and even people on the street hate white people. With Superman’s help Lois is placed inside the Plastimold and the Transformoflux Pack invented by Dahr-Nel, Kryptonian Surgeon. Apparently this machine is meant to change white people to black people. You have to wonder if Superman uses this machine often?”

Lois is just trying to be a Good Rudyard Kipling White Woman and Help Out the Ghetto Folk, all of whom treat her, like, ummmm… like a black woman in a white neighborhood. So she becomes a black woman so she can “mix” with Little Africa and get her story.

Luckily, our heroine not only gets her story but teaches the Uppity Black Panther-type guy a lesson. Don’t hate whitey! It turns out that he and she share the same blood type, and she gives him a life-saving blood transfusion.

What would these black people do, without white people?

This is one of those comics that looks like it was honestly trying to be Good and work on Race Relations… but it came at it the usual way: the white people are all nice and good and trying to work for change and trying to reach out to you, and the it’s the evil liberal black people who need to change their angry ways and stop being soooo mean.

A step forward at the time, sure, but it could have used a little more thought.