Spider-Man Actor Regrets His 'Woke' Comment

A family member recently told me that he wished liberals didn’t refer to themselves and the things they like as “woke.” He was very serious, explaining that it brought a negative connotation that would turn off potential voters or central people or whatever. “How do they appeal to more people,” he wondered. I then had to explain to him that liberal people don’t really call themselves woke (at least not anymore). That word has been taken, and then twisted and perverted to be a stand-in for whatever racist and bigoted nonsense someone may want to spew without getting in trouble. So, hearing an actor say he was glad his new Spider-Man show wasn’t “annoying and woke” naturally raised a lot of eyebrows.

That would be Hudson Thames, the latest actor to voice Spider-Man in a new cartoon called Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. The show explores an MCU-type version of Peter Parker in an alternate universe where Norman Osborn is voiced by national treasure Colman Domingo. Osborn is traditionally a white character, so someone like Domingo voicing him (and the character being African American in appearance) was very exciting! Hell, the showrunner is Jeff Trammell, who is also Black, and that rules. It also… sounds pretty woke? In the original, good way of using the word? So what the f*** was Thames talking about?

On an episode of Get Rec’d with StrawHatGoofy, Thames was asked about his comments by Mr. Goofy, who is Black. Thames’ response is … interesting. “So, obviously, something that I said was cherry-picked and used essentially with no context just to kind of stir up some drama,” Thames explained. “We were talking about that little period of time before the show came out, and I was noticing a lot of comments online that I was getting, that was either people being nervous or expressing concern that the show was using topics of diversity and equality in an inauthentic or disingenuous way. It made me defensive like I wanted to kind of defend our show a little bit.”

Hudson continued, praising the showrunner in the process. “It was such a poor choice of words,” he noted. “My point was that our show doesn’t have to do that; it doesn’t have to pull any tricks. [Showrunner] Jeff [Trammell] did such a brilliant job, in my opinion, of writing what he knew. Equality and diversity was just already baked into the story he wrote, and nothing felt forced, I suppose, so I was really just trying to compliment the grace in which that all plays out in the show, and ironically, it’s what attracted me to the show so much in the first place.”

Not the best explanation, Hudson! The snag with him being happy the show isn’t “woke” is that people twist and turn that word already. Thames explaining that he didn’t want “disingenuous” diversity is part of the problem. Diversity is diversity is diversity. When more openly abhorrent people call things “woke,” they are also arguing against diversity they deem “disingenuous”—which, unfortunately, often just means they resent its existence. He called it a poor choice of words, but that doesn’t fully acknowledge the sickening form the word has taken. It doesn’t sound like it was taken out of context—it just sounds s***ty.