How 'The Gifted' Handles Race in the X-Men's World

The core of the X-Men as a franchise has always been "the mutant metaphor," the way that mutants in the Marvel Universe can be seen as surrogates for an oppressed minority. The earliest interpretation was that X-Men was a metaphor for the civil rights movement, but it isn't a perfect metaphor.

In recent years, some have begun reexamining the X-Men in that context. The X-Men are a diverse group of characters and critics have pointed out that the focus of their struggles as mutants may sometimes serve to erase their more relevant struggles as a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ community or a member of another minority group.

While on the set of The Gifted, ComicBook.com spoke to some of the cast and creative team about the show deals with race in a world full of mutants. Grace Byers plays Reeva Payge, the new queen of the Hellfire Club. She points out that she, as a woman of color, does not fit the description of Reeva from the comics, and believes the show has leveraged that in a positive way.

"The original Reeva Payge, there's not much on her but, from the pictures, a white blonde," Byers says. "So I'm definitely not your stereotypical Reeva Payge if you will.

"I think the beautiful thing that we've done is we've kind of taken the truths that I have just as a person and we've applied them to Reeva, and because there's not as much on Reeva we have a little liberty to play around with her background. I think that we have tried to assimilate her into a world where the issues of the world that we are dealing with today very much apply to her. So I think that that's kind of how we've done what we've done and I just feel like it's so smart and so, so modern and contemporary to have her be dealing with things that people who are watching the show are probably dealing with. Not the mutant stuff but definitely feeling ostracized and feeling different. So I think we've made it more relevant"

Executive producer Derek Hoffman recognizes that the mutant metaphor is baked into the X-Men concept, saying "The levels of institutional racism or cultural biases are a big part of the X-Men."

The Gifted introduced the Purifiers in season one, but the anti-mutant fanatics will have a larger role to play in season two. Hoffman says the series is trying to approach their depiction of the group in as grounded and truthful a fashion as they can manage.

"I think with specifically with the Purifiers, bigotry at that level is inherently cartoony in a certain way, and we did not want to do that," he says. "We did not want them to be cartoon villains. And we wanted to explore the idea of how you get to that point. If you see it happening to someone else, you might realize, but they don't. And it's sort of that point where all of a sudden they look around and they're like, 'Oh, everyone I'm friends with is a member of the KKK, but I never thought I would….

"We shared with each other some documentaries on indoctrination. There was an FBI file, or an FBI report released I want to say it was in 2005. It said basically that, in the time of ISIS, it said even bigger than ISIS, the major threat to the country was hate groups infiltrating law enforcement. And it was all about the tactics, and the way that they would co-opt simple things. You see even in the news recently, like how the white power movement has taken that Pepe the Frog thing or the 'OK' symbol, or little things that suddenly people don't realize that it's been around them until they make that fateful decision. I ardently hope that we've dealt with it in a very mature way, and in a way that's kind of as realistic as you can, which is difficult because I don't know, I've never been there. I think the only way to treat the subject matter with respect is to do it as honest as you can, and so we have some ugly characters."

What do you think of The Gifted's handling of the mutant metaphor? Let us know in the comments!

The Gifted Season Two premieres Tuesday, Sept. 25th at 8 p.m. ET on FOX.