The Batman Jeffrey Wright Wright has the perfect answer to racist criticism Jim Gordon

The rest of the writer-director Matt Reeves to “The Batman” (currently known as “The Batman Part II”) should finally start production next spring. Reeves and his writing partner Mattson Tomlin finished the script in June, and some of the actors were able to read it; Colin Farrell (Oz Cobb / The Penguin) called him “extraordinary” in an interview with Deadline.

The actors who should come back alongside Farrell are Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Andy Serkis as Alfred and Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant Jim Gordon. We considered that Gordon de Wright one of the MVPs of the first film in 2022. This Jim Gordon is not yet the police commissioner, so he does a lot of field investigation with Batman as a partner. This “Buddy Cop Duo in a Rainy Urban Hellscape” is one of the many reasons why “The Batman” has been compared to “Se7en” by David Fincher.

Wright has no patience, however, for battles of bats that had a problem with a black man like playing Jim Gordon. In an interview with Collider for his latest film (“Spike Leest 2 2 Lowst” where Wright Co-Stars with Denzel Washington), Wright called this routine reaction that black actors get to play previously white characters “SO F *** Racist and stupid.” Blunt and precise. Wright extended:

“I find it really fascinating the ways of which there is such a conversation, and I think even more of a conversation now, on the black characters in these roles. […] It is so blind in a way that I find it revealing not to recognize that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society, that it is somehow paraded from this franchise so as not to keep it anchored in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comics were published for the first time. It’s just the most stupid thing. It is absent all logical. “”

This is not the first time that Wright has talked about it. In January 2022, he personally called and mocked someone ask him on Twitter If it was “fair” for him to play a white character like Gordon. Like his character, Wright certainly has no patience for clowns.

A defense of Wright as Gordon is that no one should attack the casting according to his race because he is a great actor and the best man for work. It is true, on the two counts, but this well -intentioned defense turns into an easy coloring. “Hiring the best person” is also a state of mind that can and has been overthrown to refuse marginalized positions of positions, rather than raising them.

Wright’s words, that films should follow how society changes, watch beyond the trees to see the forest. As he noted, Batman and Commissioner Gordon made their debut in 1939. At that time, segregation was still legal at the national level in the United States, it was only in the 1960s, after African-American voting rights were devoted to the law, that black superheroes began to appear on the funny pages.

Even thus, there are still imbalances in representation. Lucius Fox, the most major black character of “Batman” Comics, made his debut until 1979, thanks to the writer Len Wein and the artist John Calnan. This corrected an absence of black characters in the comics, in the same way as a black Jim Gordon made of Gotham City in “The Batman” feels more like the real world. Nor is it a change without consequences. Gordon being a black man adds a new subtext to his characterization as an honest cop in Gotham, the one that all the corrupt cops of the GCPD work to undermine and target.

Historical injustices against black Americans to remedy, sufficient diversity in comics is not a high priority – but it is important to fight racism in any space where it appears. This is what a hero like Batman would do, so his fans should follow the example.

“The Batman leaves II” should be released on October 1, 2027.