X-Men has always had a race problem. Since the conception of the comics, the allegories of mutants and race have been discussed, with fans calling the treatment of mutants an allegory for race and even so far equating Charles Xavier and Magento to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively. With each rendition of X-Men, race becomes an intrinsic part of the narrative yet is never directly explored in the canon. With Disney and Marvel’s newest adaptation, X-Men ‘97, releasing in 2024 and created by Beau DeMayo, a Black gay man, it would be safe to assume that issues of race and sexuality would be in the show. However, X-Men ’97 egregiously continues the X-Men curse of talking around marginalization using the catch-all mutant narrative. The show takes a colorblind approach to depicting its characters by adding characters of color into the background. The diversity of the X-Men world harks to the multi-cultural ideology of the 1990s in the U.S. However, this utopian view of race backfires as the show quickly sidelines the two Black characters they have, Storm and Bishop. Bishop embodies the magical negro archetype as he disappears as an act of assisting the main White characters. Storm is doomed as a Black woman to suffer by violently losing her powers and working her way back to those powers with the assistance of U.S. Native American tropes and imagery. This new adaptation begs the question: Can X-Men ever effectively talk about race, or is it doomed always to be colorblind? 

X-Men ’97 demonstrates how comic book media relies on nostalgia and will have a difficult time moving forward in conversations regarding marginalized identities. The show continues the X-Men animated series, which ended in 1997. It is stuck in the 90s with its political rhetoric even though the show tries to bring in current events such as the insurrection episode. If being a mutant is the catch-all for marginalization, X-Men will always be an introductory example of marginalized political statements. Race, sexuality, religion, and gender come second to the mutant.