Diversity and Representation in Media

That Miles’s father shares his name with the president of the Confederate States of America, one of the most horrific advocates for the continuation and expansion of racial slavery, might be shrugged off as a coincidence — although this would be akin to Superman landing in Smallville, Kansas, and being raised by a farmer randomly named Robert E. Lee. The name of Miles’s father stands out even more against the character’s background. Jefferson is an NYPD officer in both the movie and the video game, whereas in the comics he is a former criminal turned undercover aide to Nick Fury and, ultimately, an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Both versions are laden with racial connotations and potential minefields for even the most politically adept and sensitive writers.

Incredibly, the stories give much more attention to the fact that Miles is given his mother’s last name. The multiple explanations include that his father didn’t want to burden his son with his criminal past, or that it would just be plain silly to have his son share his name with the jazz musician Miles Davis. This is apparently less absurd than Jefferson Davis’s own namesake, now left up to posters on troubling message boards to sort out.

Of course, it is relatively easy to speculate about why Miles’s father is named Jefferson Davis. Occam’s razor suggests that it is because at no point in the development of the character had anyone in the creative or editorial team considered it noteworthy. They either had not remembered Jefferson Davis from their US history class or did not care. For what it’s worth, the creative team led by Bendis has found themselves on the wrong side of more than one controversy over their handling of race.

[...]

The directness with which Reynolds addresses the naming of Miles’s father in his YA novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2017) is refreshingly shocking: Miles learns for the first time about the historical Jefferson Davis from Mr. Chamberlain, his villainous history teacher who not only romanticizes slavery in class but turns out to be part of a network of Confederate zombies working to punish students of color and fuel the school-to-prison pipeline.

In the novel, Miles attempts to figure out why his spidey-sense is triggered every time he is in Mr. Chamberlain’s class. On one occasion, Mr. Chamberlain quizzes students about the originator of the quote, “All we ask is to be let alone.” He provokes Miles out of his stupor when he announces it was Jefferson Davis, reminding Miles of his father. As Chamberlain explains, “The quote is a simple one, but it means so, so much. It’s simply asking that the people of the South be allowed to govern themselves. That the way things were was just fine.” A student speaks up, saying, “Unless you were a slave.” But Mr. Chamberlain continues his lesson unabated: “We underestimate the bond between slave and master. So many slaves were comfortable with being enslaved. Happy even. Later this week, maybe I’ll bring in some images to better illustrate my point.” Building on this white supremacist view, Mr. Chamberlain suggests that the prison-industrial complex thankfully provides a similar, modern-day “opportunity.” Miles, a direct target of Mr. Chamberlain’s racism throughout the novel, suffers through the lesson, “letting every word dagger through his mind.”

Building to the climax of the novel, Miles once again hears this quote, this time uttered by his father in reference to his now deceased super-villain brother, Miles’s Uncle Aaron. Miles and Jefferson learn that Aaron had a son, Austin, whom they decide to visit in prison. After realizing that Aaron’s desire to care for his son might have motivated his turn to crime, Miles’s father laments, “Like, I always thought he just couldn’t help himself. Or … didn’t want to … and all I wanted was to be left alone.”

With the repetition of this quote, Miles must consider his father side-by-side with the specter of Jefferson Davis, once again through the link between slavery and the carceral state. At issue is Miles’s father’s belief that Aaron “couldn’t help himself [from committing crimes]. Or didn’t want to…” This characterization of Aaron mirrors the rhetoric of Black criminality used so frequently to justify over-policing, racial profiling, and outright police brutality in communities of color. Moreover, the echoed desire to be “left alone” now refers not to Southern states’ desire to protect the institution of slavery, but Jefferson’s desire to separate himself from his criminal brother, and by extension his community, in order to excel — a dynamic also reflected in his decision to enter Miles into the lottery that would send him to the charter school Brooklyn Visions Academy.

From this point of the novel forward, Miles begins to discover that Mr. Chamberlain is actually just one of untold Mr. Chamberlains who have been torturing and framing Black and Latinx teenagers in schools, detention centers, and prisons across New York City, and perhaps beyond, to ensure the continuation of slavery. In true genre fashion, Miles follows his Mr. Chamberlain to a secret meeting of Confederate zombies led by a prison warden who presides under a large portrait of … the historical Jefferson Davis. With this apt image, Reynolds invokes the undead, ideological legacy of white supremacy that remains too diffuse to individuate. And, what better represents the intractability of this legacy, Reynolds self-referentially suggests, than naming the Afro-Latinx Spider-Man’s dad Jefferson Davis?