This week on his show, Bill Maher screwed up again. Admittedly, we should all know by this point that Maher’s a prime example of, at best, a broken clock being right twice a day, given his repeated Islamophobia, sexism, and transphobia, but this particular screwup is actually kind of interesting:

“If you’re asking, what’s the problem? The problem is that superhero movies imprint this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny, and the best we can do is sit back and wait for Star-Lord and a f***ing raccoon to sweep in and save our sorry asses. Forget hard work, government institutions, diplomacy, investment. We just need a hero to rise, and so we put out the Bat Signal for one man who could step in and solve all our problems very quickly. And that’s how we got our latest superhero: Orange Sphincter.”

(Guess who.)

Okay, for one thing—let’s just get this out of the way—this whole segment is, in essence, the latest in a long line of rhetorical gymnastics routines that white talking heads have used to avoid blaming racism for the outcome of the 2016 election. It’s the spiritual successor to The Atlantic’s “cultural anxiety.” But because superheroes have such a long history as vehicles for exploring (or, on the flip side, as vulnerable to) the major issues of their eras, it’s absolutely worth interrogating the relationship between superhero movies and the modern, post-9/11 populace that consumes them. In essence, superhero movies have contributed somewhat, some more than others, to the rhetoric the Annoying Orange rode to 1600 Penn—but the why is so much more complicated than Maher’s lazy hot take makes it seem. Let’s tackle this one point at a time:

1. The relationship between superheroes and the US government is far from straightforward.

It’s eyebrow-raising, first off, that Maher included “government institutions” on the list of superhero replacements, because in comics and movies alike, superheroes have always had an uneven, often fraught relationship with the governments that either lay claim to or actually do control them. I know I bring this up in basically every single super-hot take I ever write, but Captain America was born punching Hitler before the US had officially entered World War II (but after they’d turned away a ship full of Jewish refugees in Florida). Cap has, at other times, directly allied himself with the US government, like in the 1950s when he was an anti-Communist sniffer dog for about three issues, but on so many other occasions, he’s expressed distrust of the US government. Governmental overreach is the linchpin of the 2006-07 Civil War comics event. Cap gets pissed at Nick Fury in The Avengers, a movie in which his anti-authoritarian streak is otherwise powerfully suppressed, when he finds out SHIELD has been using the tesseract to make ultra-powerful weapons. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an absolutely biting critique of the NSA and PRISM, and though Captain America: Civil War didn’t reproduce the comics plotline especially faithfully (I’d argue that a lot of that plotline actually went into Winter Soldier), the discussion the Avengers have after the Sokovia Accords are shoved at them asks a lot of hard questions about the role of governments in enforcing accountability.

There’s also this whole subgenre of movies that I like to call Ambiguously Metaphorical Superhero Persecution. Both The Incredibles and Watchmen take place in worlds from which superhero activity has been banned, deemed too dangerous to the public; all the heroic activity in the former is extralegal, and in the latter, the only legitimate superheroes are government agents. The X-Men are anti-authoritarian poster children, at least on the surface; the entire point of them, as their spate of movies has repeatedly made it clear, is that the government is after them precisely because of who they are. (That’s an extremely important point, and I’ll return to it later.)

On the other hand, there are a select few superhero movies in which superheroes have a better relationship with the US government. Spider-Man, of all characters, got pigeonholed into some sort of patriotic-symbol role in the Sam Raimi trilogy; the much-panned third film features a shot of him mid-jump in front of an American flag. Although Stan Lee used Spider-Man to put forth the idea of great power’s link with great responsibility in the character’s earliest comics days, the Raimi movies almost completely abandon Peter Parker’s wisecracking tendencies in favor of what Joseph Sommers calls an “overly emotional construction… super-saturated with grief and responsibility” which, as Sommers argues, enable the movies to serve as a catharsis for the national trauma of 9/11. On a more insidious note, the US Department of Defense has provided assistance a plethora of Hollywood action/adventure battlefests, as Georg Löfflmann has detailed—supposedly in the name of increasing these movies’ scientific and factual accuracy, but often this assistance has been a means for the Pentagon to improve the image of the US government and military as presented in these movies. Notably, The Avengers and subsequent Marvel movies featuring SHIELD in a prominent role haven’t received governmental assistance—apparently SHIELD’s existence fouls up the military chain of command too much—but both Iron Man and Iron Man 2 benefited from the Pentagon’s consultancy, as well as Man of Steel.

Again, let me emphasize: the Pentagon consults on Hollywood movies that make the US government and military look super awesome and powerful. That’s an incredibly important point. Keep that in mind for later.

2. We’re always supposed to identify with the superheroes in these movies.

The superhero as an archetype emerged from what Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence called the American monomyth:

“A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil. Normal institutions fail to contend with this threat. A selfless hero emerges to renounce temptation and carry out the redemptive task, and, aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisal condition. The superhero then recedes into obscurity.”

Superman, the first recognizable superhero, is the most faithful example of this basic character and plot structure, and indeed when he emerged in 1938 people were immediately enamored of this new savior figure—but, as Jeffrey Lang and Patrick Trimble have discussed, the archetypal superhero shifted as the 20^th century progressed. Again, thanks to Stan Lee, superheroes became more human, more plagued with doubts, and their situations became less black and white and more morally ambiguous—all this in the name of relatability. It makes sense, then, that so many modern-day superhero movies are origin stories. We first meet and form emotional bonds with these heroes when they’re human, so as they go through their various metamorphoses and eventually defeat the Big Bad, we’re led to believe that we can do the same—that at their core, superheroes are just like us. Even Superman, who literally isn’t even human, gets an extremely clumsy version of this treatment in Man of Steel, through all those flashbacks to his childhood.

3. The “we” in the second statement, however, is often extremely limited.

Listen, at the risk of stating the obvious, I love superhero movies. But at this juncture, I have to reiterate a giant problem with the genre that’s been brought up again and again: it’s so heavily white and male. Even when female and/or nonwhite superheroes exist, they’re often sidelined or degraded in some way. Black Widow may outsmart Loki in The Avengers, but he still gets to use a really nasty (if obsolete) gendered slur against her. Sure, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones have starred in their own TV series, but it’ll take till 2018 and 2019 (respectively) for a black man and a white woman to lead tentpole Marvel blockbusters. Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson is the lead of Agents of SHIELD in all but the show’s name, but despite being a canonical Inhuman, there’s no sign that she’ll be in Marvel’s upcoming Inhumans movie. Wanda Maximoff has had her Jewish and Romani heritage erased in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Pietro had that happen to him in two separate franchises (I will never stop being annoyed that 20^th Century Fox made him “Peter Maximoff”). Jason Zingsheim has analyzed Bryan Singer’s X-Men trilogy in depth along these exact lines and found that the movies, despite their rather obvious oppression allegory, prioritize white men and erase the ethnic heritage of characters like Storm. And that’s not even getting into the secondary characters—the sidekicks, the damsels in distress, the fridged girlfriends, the Orientalist villains, the one-dimensional ambiguously Middle Eastern terrorist.

You get the picture.

Using superhero stories as oppression allegories is an old practice. Superman himself—who, like Captain America, was created by two Jewish men—mirrored the Jewish immigrant experience in the 1930s. Decades later, Stan Lee made it clear in a letter for “Stan’s Soapbox” that the X-Men were meant to be read as an allegory for racism. (It’s also worth mentioning that Stan Lee is also Jewish and was born as Stanley Lieber.) Making these metaphorical connections in the middle of the twentieth century was extremely powerful, to be sure. But what’s become increasingly clear to me in recent years is that allegories aren’t enough. When the victims of these fictional oppression allegories, the persecuted social outsiders, are universally white and mostly male—well, sure, it’s possible for viewers to extract the true intent of the allegory from the main story. I won’t dispute that. However, it’s impossible to ignore that the sentiment Emperor Tangerine rode to the White House is, in essence, white people’s giant persecution complex. It’d be absurd to unilaterally blame superhero movies for that persecution complex—such a statement would dismiss the very real subversion present in movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Deadpool, and it would also be yet another attempt to avoid blaming racism for the election outcome. At the same time, though, these movies have such a giant audience and market share that to say they contributed to this persecution-complex rhetoric isn’t at all out of line.

So, Bill Maher, you want to blame superhero movies for the rise of the KFC demon? Fine, then let’s talk about how the Pentagon uses Hollywood blockbusters as a propaganda machine, glorifying the very tools of war Dilbert Turnip is raring to use. Let’s talk about the horrific lack of racial and gender diversity in superhero movies. Let’s talk about how it took till this year, with Power Rangers, for us to have a canonically neurodivergent superhero, and how we still don’t have one headlining superhero in either Marvel or DC who’s canonically queer (poor Trini Kwan, in Power Rangers, didn't even get to say the word "gay"). Let’s talk about how too many superhero movies only engage in a cursory, frankly lazy fashion with oppression metaphors rather than actively exploring and delivering on those metaphors.

Oh, and let’s also actually blame racism for the 2016 election results while we’re at it.