Comic Book PSA: People are People

According to this ethnocentric Comic Book PSA that appeared in The Brave and the Bold #39 (Jan 1962), in the dawn of humanity all people were Caucasian and of European appearance.

Like romance comic books that tried to be contemporary, sometimes the Comic Book PSA was a creative victim of social and cultural expectations of what the market would bear or what the old men in the Editorial offices thought would be acceptable.

I suspect that presenting early homo sapiens in a form that would more accurately reflect our actual genetic ancestry (currently scientifically accepted as having origins in the African continent) may never have even occurred to the creators of the PSA. The artist was probably tasked to draw cavemen and did so in the usual comic book manner. At least I hope so and that institutionalized racism was not in place in the DC offices.

This PSA is important culturally due to the feature presenting as fact all the various ethnic groups of humankind diverging from an already perfectly evolved modern Caucasian man. I thought it brave that even in 1962, in spite of the imagery, for DC to point out that all people are equal and none were superior to any other.

Tags: Comic Book PSA