The Batman's Jeffrey Wright Has The Perfect Response To Racist Jim Gordon Criticism

Writer-director Matt Reeves' sequel to "The Batman" (currently known as "The Batman Part II") is scheduled to finally begin production next spring. Reeves and his writing partner Mattson Tomlin completed the script back in June, and some of the cast have gotten to read it; Colin Farrell (Oz Cobb/The Penguin) called it "extraordinary" in an interview with Deadline.

Actors expected to return alongside Farrell are Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Andy Serkis as Alfred, and Jeffrey Wright as Lt. Jim Gordon. We deemed Wright's Gordon one of the first movie's MVPs back in 2022. This Jim Gordon isn't the police commissioner (yet), so he does a lot of on-the-ground investigating with Batman as his partner. This "buddy cop duo in a rainy urban hellscape" set-up is one of many reasons that "The Batman" has been compared to David Fincher's "Se7en." 

Wright has no patience, though, for any Bat-fans who had a problem with a Black man like himself playing Jim Gordon. In an interview with Collider for his latest movie (Spike Lee's "Highest 2 Lowest" where Wright co-stars with Denzel Washington), Wright called this routine backlash that Black actors get for playing previously white characters "so f***ing racist and stupid." Blunt and accurate. Wright expanded: 

"I really find it fascinating the ways in which there's such a conversation, and I think even more of a conversation now, about Black characters in these roles. [...] It's just so blind in a way that I find revealing to not recognize that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society, that somehow it's defiling this franchise not to keep it grounded in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comic books were first published. It's just the dumbest thing. It's absent all logic."

This isn't the first time Wright has spoken up about this. Back in January 2022, he personally called out and mocked someone asking him on Twitter if it was "right" for him to play a white character like Gordon. Like his character, Wright definitely has no patience for clowns. 

One defense of Wright as Gordon is that no one should attack the casting based on his race because he's a great actor and the best man for the job. This is true, on both counts, but this well-intentioned defense veers into facile colorblindness. "Hire the best person" is also a mindset that can and has been flipped around to deny marginalized people from positions, rather than elevating them.

Wright's words, that films should keep up with how society changes, look past the trees to see the forest. As he notes, Batman and Commissioner Gordon debuted in 1939. At that time, segregation was still legal at the national level in the U.S. It wasn't until the 1960s, after African American voting rights were enshrined into law, that Black superheroes started appearing on the funny pages.

Even so, there are still imbalances of representation. Lucius Fox, the most major Black character in "Batman" comics, didn't debut until 1979, thanks to writer Len Wein and artist John Calnan. That was correcting an absence of Black characters in the comics, the same way a Black Jim Gordon makes Gotham City in "The Batman" feel more like the real world. It's not a change without consequence, either. Gordon being a Black man adds new subtext to his characterization as the one honest cop in Gotham, the one whom all the corrupt cops in the GCPD work to undermine and target.

Of the historical injustices against Black Americans to remedy, sufficient diversity in comic books isn't nor should be a high priority — but it is important to fight racism in any space where it appears. That's what a hero like Batman would do, so his fans should follow the example.

"The Batman Part II" is scheduled to release theatrically on October 1, 2027.