Why do you want a black Captain America? Ideology.
Allow me to clarify: I don't want a black Captain America. I don't want Captain America, period. Superheroes, as a genre, do not figure highly on my list of wants. As I said, I'm mostly into science fiction and fantasy comics; my sequential periodical of choice is 2000AD, and I'm also a big Hellboy fan. As Camikaze said, I'm merely okay with a black Captain America, and think that objections to a black Captain America are spurious at best, and more likely just outright racist. If Captain America had been replaced by another white character, or had continued on as Steve Rogers, I doubt I'd even have noticed.
Why replace Steve Rogers as Captain America - in violation of canon - with a black guy who is
already a black superhero and has been for many decades.
You've expressed your enthusiasm for generous readings, for giving people of the doubt, so let me give you my theory on this one.
Marvel has always tried to weave a greater degree of substance into its stories than other major superhero publishers (which at this point means DC, but one described a number of rivals). I remember Alan Moore saying something to the effect of Marvel characters like Spider-man and the Hulk being a revelation, because although they were basically two-dimensional, that was a whole dimension more than what the other publishers were offering. In recent years this had meant tentatively introducing to the genre a fourth dimension, which they had previously tended to lack. Superheroes were inexplicably ageless, and not just the heroes but their environment, the non-heroes they interact with. That was fine when you could just keep piling on convoluted increasingly extravagant stories to give the impression of development, but that's a harder sell than it used to be. Particularly, I dare say, to Marvel-readers.
So how do you add development? By letting characters
develop. By letting them age, by letting them pass through different phases, by letting them develop more complex and deeper relationships with each other rather than just accumulating nemeses. This is something that the better superhero writers have been trying to do for a while, but it's always been limited by editorial demands that the same recognisable characters stay on the covers. (Take note: the shoes of both Thor and Captain America have previously been filled by different characters, but always on an apparently temporary basis. The biggest change here is not the replacements, but they fact that they seem to be indefinite.) I would speculate that Marvel is finding, as its audience increasingly shifts towards the upper end of the 15-30 scale and beyond it, this isn't making so much commercial sense as it used to, and they're beginning to wonder if a bit of controlled experimentation might be in order. Perhaps it'll turn out to be nothing but a gimmick, but perhaps the audience will respond well to the succession of heroes across generations, rather than their simple reinvention for each generation. Maybe they'll prefer a second-, third-, fourth- generation hero to the fourth iteration of the same guy.
So why Captain America? Because Captain America is a good choice. Three reasons. One, Captain America is a good choice from a commercial perspective. He's both a prominent hero, but also one with a strong association with a team, the Avengers, which offers a range of potential replacements who are well-known to the readers. It allows the change to make the maximum impact within the fandom while being, if executed properly, the least jarring for readers of the series.
Two, Captain America is a good choice from a narrative perspective. Captain America is unique in that time really does march on for him. You can constantly revise the origin story of Peter Parker or Tony Stark to keep them an appropriate age, but Steve Rogers is defined in a big way by his participation in the Second World War. He can't not be a veteran of that conflict. But the war was seventy years ago, there's no credible way that even an enhanced human could have lived all that time and still be in peak physical condition. And Marvel knows this, because they retroactively turned him into an ice cube back in the sixties. So even if you constantly revise the date at which he thawed out, attribute his super-serum with increasingly unlikely life-extending abilities, the weight of time still hangs over him. Uncle Ben always died just a few years before the story you're reading, but Captain America's parents died a
while ago, and they're only getting deader. That makes him a natural candidate for a story about ageing, retirement, and the need to hand over to a younger generation.
Three, from the perspective of the genre, Captain America's heroic identity is much more explicitly constructed than others. While the identity of other characters may constitute a genuine alter-ego, an idealised version of that particular individual, the identity of Captain America was constructed to express a more general idea, the American ideal. If you felt sentimental- and I don't, but I can try on the hat for the sake of argument- you could say that Captain America isn't one person, he's three hundred million people, and it just so happens that the guy named Steve Rogers is wearing the outfit at this moment. Iron Man is really just Tony Stark in a robot suit. Cyclops is the idealised self-image of Scott Summers. Thor is Thor, because he's from a planet where dressing like that isn't considered weird. But Captain America
is America, or at least one vision of America, and that's open to anyone worthy of the job.
And you might well add a fourth one in there: that Steve Rogers is the sort of guy who would hand his mask to an African-American
just to make the point. Marvel's writers have been pretty candid about the fact that the ideal of American nationhood the Captain represents is a progressive and anti-racist one- this was a character who once smacked Hitler in the gob, after all- and it's quite credible that Rogers would decided to choose his successor not simply on the basis of heroic ability, but as an affirmation of the ideals for which the identity of Captain America stood. He gave Hitler a smack in the gob, and now he's giving the American comics-buying public a smack in the gob, because evidently they are in sore need of it.
). This doesn't legitimize that the vast masses of media representations cater to the political power of a population segment.
