We Aren’t Z-O-M-B-I-E-S!: why metaphors for marginalization often fail.
The zombies in Disney’s Z-O-M-B-I-E-S don’t look Black. They have naturally green hair, ashen skin, purple veins, and they were created via lime soda. But still, it is easy to see that they are meant to be a metaphor for the experience of Black people in America.
Separated into a bad part of town creatively called Zombie-Town, the titular zombies attempt to integrate into human high school. They also attempt to make the analogy clear through the behavioral differences between humans and zombies. The humans dress in pastels, live in the suburbs, and sing and dance in a musical theater and peppy style, while the zombies dress in streetwear, desire equality, and dance, sing, and rap in a style meant to emulate hiphop.
While the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S trilogy and other movies that use metaphors for different marginalized groups attempt to address difficult issues in a way that is nuanced, yet fun and fantastical, they often fall miserably short, and end up trivializing the experiences of marginalized people, as well as fail to capture the nuance of the true experience of these groups.
Within each film, Disney’s Z-O-M-B-I-E-S trilogy attempts to address a different racially or ethnically marginalized group. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2 introduces the Werewolves meant to be a metaphor for Indigenous people in America. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 is even more on the nose by introducing Aliens who are a metaphor for, you guessed it, refugees and immigrants.
When I first watched Z-O-M-B-I-E-S with my younger sister I genuinely had to pause when I realized the analogy it was trying to sell. One of the largest problems in these metaphors is how they often end up demonizing marginalized groups by giving a reason as to why they are discriminated against that is genuinely true in the context of their world. In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, the zombies weren’t just people or mutants who happened to look like zombies, but they were zombies in the literal sense, the kill-and-eat-people sense. Yet Disney was trying to compare Black people who are already stereotyped as being inherently more athletic and dangerous, to brain-eating zombies who could lose control the second the technology made to temper their violent urges fails.
The metaphor relies on the idea of two groups that are genuinely biologically different, where the stand-in for the marginalized group is the one with more physical power and the discrimination is born out of genuine reasonable fear. The basis of the analogy is flawed because they use the visuals and language of marginalized peoples without the truth that there is no biological basis for the idea of race. These metaphors end up doing the opposite of their intention by accidentally vilifying people of color re-enforcing the same stereotypes that they set out to dissuade.
An even deeper ingrained issue within these metaphors is the fact that they often lead to non-marginalized faces becoming the faces of marginalized experiences in popular culture. This separation between marginalized peoples and their experiences allows for a detachment between them and their own fight for their liberation. Further, within the worlds of these metaphors, it necessitates that the actual marginalized groups the analogy is based on are ignored, or incidentally framed as being part of the oppressor.
In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, two out of three of the main zombies we follow throughout the movies are racially white. In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2 none of the main werewolves are indigenous, and in Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 the aliens are made to represent immigrants as a whole without care to the individual experiences of immigration that can be influenced by intersectionality. Furthermore, several of the human characters who are explicitly racist to the monsters in the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S are actual people of color.
Similar issues can also be found in Marvel’s X-men comics, as well as movies. In the universe of the X-men, mutants are used as a metaphor to explore the experiences of almost every marginalized group, including disabled people, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and more. However, even with the sheer amount of groups that the mutants are meant to represent, they only have that representation metaphorically. While these metaphors represent the experiences, they fail to represent the people. A majority of the main characters are white, straight, cisgender, and able-bodied.
However, an instance that I think hilariously highlights the problem with not addressing actually marginalized groups is an instance in the Teen Titans 2000s TV show where Starfire is called the alien equivalent of a racial slur and ends up having a conversation with Cyborg the only human Black main character who happens to also be a cyborg. During this conversation, Cyborg relates to Starfire being discriminated against on the basis of her race as a Tamaranian. You would think he would also relate on the basis of his race as a Black man in America, but instead, we get this interaction. “Starfire: You know what it is like to be judged simply by the way you look?
Cyborg: Of course I do… I’m part robot.”
I believe that movies that are analogies for different marginalized experiences regardless of their intentions often cause more harm than good as they often fall short and rely on stereotypes and end up erasing the groups they attempt to represent altogether. I believe that it is better to just tell the actual stories of marginalized people, and if and when these marginalization metaphors are used, the marginalized people should be the ones in the writers’ room. Because without telling the true stories, some part of the truth will always remain misrepresented or missing altogether.
Works Cited:
Hoen, Paul. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S. Disney Channel., 2018.
Hoen, Paul. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2. Disney Channel., 2020.
Hoen, Paul. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3. Disney Channel., 2022.
Hovet, Kristen. “There Is No Such Thing as Race at the Genetic Level.” Medium, The Startup, 3 May 2020, https://medium.com/swlh/there-is-no-such-thing-as-race-at-the-genetic-level-e0e1ba86a540.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. “There’s No Scientific Basis for Race-It’s a Made-up Label.” Magazine, National Geographic, 3 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/race-genetics-science-africa.
Lewald, Eric, and Julia Lewald. X-Men. Abrams, 2020.
Murakami, Glen. Register, Sam. Teen Titans.Cartoon Network., 2003.
Oliver, Mary Beth. “African American Men as ‘Criminal and Dangerous’: Implications of Media Portrayals of Crime on the ‘Criminalization’ of African American Men.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2003, pp. 3–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41819017. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.
