Mutant Rights

Summary

Radiolab – "Mutant Rights"
Episode Date: December 22, 2011
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Special Guests: Ike V. Khandaraja, Sherry Singer, Indy Singh, Bryan Singer, Joe Liebman

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Overview: Exploring the Boundaries of Humanity Through Tax Law

In "Mutant Rights," Radiolab dives into an unusual customs case that forces the US government to answer a bizarre but profound question: What does it mean to be human? When Marvel Comics' X-Men action figures are at stake, this legal inquiry transforms into a meditation on identity, belonging, and the surprisingly tangled dealings between pop culture and tax law. The episode explores how customs classifications and a legal battle over toy tariffs left Marvel's mutants officially “not human”—with ripple effects about societal categories, civil rights, and what it means to not fit in.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Harmonized Tariff Schedule: Where Humans and Monsters Diverge

00:55 – 03:43

• Background: In 1993, customs attorneys Sherry Singer and Indy Singh came across the US government’s Harmonized Tariff Schedule during work for Marvel Comics.
  • The Schedule categorizes imports for taxation: "Dolls" are representations of humans (taxed at 12%); "Toys" are anything else—robots, monsters, angels (taxed at 6.8%).
• Marvel's Problem: Marvel’s action figures (including superheroes and mutants) were being taxed as "dolls"—as if they exclusively represented humans.
  • Indy Singh: "Everything was a doll? Yeah, at 12% rate of duty." [03:20]
• Financial Stakes: Singer and Singh saw a huge financial opportunity if Marvel’s figures could be moved from “dolls” (human) to “toys” (non-human/other), saving “more than a million dollars” [03:49].

2. Are X-Men Action Figures Human?

04:02 – 07:06

• Legal and Philosophical Quandary: The case boiled down to whether Marvel’s characters, especially the X-Men, are representations of humans or something else.
  • Ike V. Khandaraja: "They have to convince government officials that under US Law, these characters are not considered human." [04:04]
• Singer and Singh physically brought dozens of figures to US Customs in DC, arguing that features like blue fur (Beast) or claws (Wolverine) disqualified these figures from being "human" under tariff law.
  • Sherry Singer: “Our argument would be is human beings do not have blue skin. The judge agreed it doesn’t resemble a human being.” [06:57]

3. Mutation, Augmentation, and Human Identity

07:17 – 09:27

• The Beast and Wolverine Cases: The government argued features like heads, arms, torsos made figures human-like. The attorneys countered that mutant characteristics (e.g., blue fur, claws) were fundamentally nonhuman.
  • Joe Liebman (for the government): "He has aspects that perhaps are closer to the monster." [07:20]
  • Robert Krulwich: “If one of them just gives you claws, that doesn’t mean that the other 19,999 genes are keeping you pretty much in the human classification.” [08:46]
• Real-World Parallels: The case referenced real-life augmentation and mutation, including athlete Oscar Pistorius’s prosthetic legs, to challenge the boundaries of “human.”

4. Cultural Paradoxes: Mutants as Metaphor for Civil Rights

09:29 – 13:55

• The Marvel Paradox: In the comics, mutants struggle to fit into human society—fighting for rights and acceptance. In court, Marvel asserts X-Men are NOT human for financial gain.
  • Ike V. Khandaraja: “But in the real world, it’s exactly the opposite. You got Marvel saying they’re monsters, and you got the government saying, no, let them be human.” [10:09]
• Bryan Singer’s Perspective: Director Bryan Singer discusses the X-Men’s origins during the civil rights movement, and their function as allegories for marginalized groups.
  • Bryan Singer: “It’s no coincidence that it was born during the height of the civil rights movement.” [11:08]
• The show highlights an X-Men film scene as a metaphor for “coming out,” emphasizing the franchise’s resonance for gay rights allegories as well.

5. The Legal Outcome: Officially Not Human

13:55 – End

• Resolution: After 10 years of litigation, the judge rules that all Marvel heroes are not human, lowering their tariff and saving Marvel significant money.
  • Ike V. Khandaraja: “Eventually, the judge ruled that all Marvel heroes, not just the X-Men, are not human.” [14:22]
  • Jad Abumrad: "So Sherry and Indy won." [14:29]
• Aftermath Reflection: The attorneys feel no guilt for “robbing humanity” from the characters, highlighting the sometimes arbitrary boundaries within law and identity.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Robert Krulwich: “This is about what goes where, and what doesn’t go there, and what should go there if you were only smarter about it.” [00:36]
• Jad Abumrad (on dolls vs. toys): “So getting a Barbie doll into the country would be more expensive than, like, importing a Transformer or something?” [02:31]
• Sherry Singer (on legal argument): “Human beings do not have blue skin. The judge agreed…” [06:57]
• Bryan Singer (on the X-Men): “All the movies at their heart are parables about living in a world where you don’t fit.” [10:32]
• Bryan Singer (on allegory): “It’s no coincidence that it was born during the height of the civil rights movement.” [11:08]
• Bobby Drake’s mother (from X-Men film): “Have you tried not being a mutant?” [13:51] (Jad quoting the line)
• Ike V. Khandaraja: “Marvel Comics has created this world where mutants want to be treated like humans…and in the real world, it’s exactly the opposite.” [10:09]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:55–03:43 — Introduction to the customs/tariff dilemma and Marvel's legal challenge.
• 04:02–07:06 — Explaining the human vs. nonhuman classification with the X-Men.
• 07:17–09:27 — The argument about mutation, augmentation, and the edge cases (Beast and Wolverine).
• 09:29–13:55 — Cultural context: X-Men as a metaphor for marginalized identities, Bryan Singer’s insights.
• 13:55–14:22 — The legal outcome: Marvel’s heroes ruled “not human.”

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Conclusion

"Mutant Rights" is a playful but thought-provoking episode showing how the definitions we create—legal, scientific, social—can shape culture, commerce, and our intuitions about self and other. Through the lens of a customs lawsuit, Radiolab explores what it means not just to be human, but to fit (or not fit) into society’s boxes—a narrative with implications far beyond comic books.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay. All right.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Okay.

[Bryan Singer]

All right.

[Sherry Singer]

You're listening to Radiolab.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Radiolab shorts from wnyc.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

And npr. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab podcast, and today on the podcast, we're gonna talk about containers.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, no.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Why not?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, because it's bigger than containers. It's categories.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ugh.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because it's the boring way.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's the boring word for containers.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, it's not at all boring.

[Jad Abumrad]

Taxonomy. Can we say that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, you could. Yes. This is a story about what goes where and what doesn't go there and what should go there if you were only smarter about it. Ike, Sweet. Are you around?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Yeah. That's what I want to talk about.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you have a story to tell us, right?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you tell us your story.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, set it up for us, Ike.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, let's start back in 1993.

[Bryan Singer]

Okay.

[Indy Singh]

Yes.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

With two customs attorneys.

[Sherry Singer]

I'm Sherry Singer, and my name is Indy Singh.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Singer and Singh.

[Jad Abumrad]

Singer and Singh.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And one day, the two of them are looking at this customs book called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

[Jad Abumrad]

What was it called again? The Harmonized.

[Indy Singh]

Harmonized Tariff.

[Jad Abumrad]

Harm, you almost harmonized the Harmonized Tariff System.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

It's this huge book, chock full of customs classifications.

[Sherry Singer]

Meat products, milk products, vegetables.

[Indy Singh]

It's got everything in it, literally thousands of provisions.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

So they're flipping through this big book, and what they noticed that day is that in this book were the following.

[Indy Singh]

Words representing only human beings.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

They saw this fateful phrase right next to the word doll under the harmonized.

[Sherry Singer]

A doll was something that represented only a human being.

[Jad Abumrad]

A doll represented a human being.

[Sherry Singer]

Only a human.

[Jad Abumrad]

Only a human being.

[Sherry Singer]

It could not be any other creature but a human being.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Barbie is a doll.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Right. But here's the thing. In this big book, right next to dolls is this whole other category called.

[Sherry Singer]

Toys, which covers things like monsters, robots.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Angels, basically anything that isn't only representing a human.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the dolls are human and the toys are not human?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And where it gets weird is that these two categories were being taxed differently.

[Robert Krulwich]

How? How differently?

[Indy Singh]

12% for dolls and 6.8% for toys.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? So getting a Barbie doll into the country would be more expensive than, like, importing a Transformer or something?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Indy Singh]

I assume it was because there was a domestic industry, a domestic doll industry that wanted and needed protection.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Do you think there was a powerful doll lobby? Anyhow, you got these two categories. You got these two ladies and they have a client called Marvel Comics.

[Robert Krulwich]

Marvel Comics? This is the home of men with capes and superpowers.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Yes, and beautiful boots tights.

[Robert Krulwich]

Marvel. Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

What about Marvel?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, Marvel Comics has this universe of action figures coming into our ports as dolls.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, all their action figures were being classified as dolls?

[Indy Singh]

Everything was a doll?

[Sherry Singer]

Yeah, at 12% rate of duty.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And Sherry and Indy realized that there's a huge opportunity here. If they can convince the government to remove the Marvel action heroes from the human Y Barbie doll category and push them into the robot demony toy category, they can save a huge amount of money.

[Robert Krulwich]

We saw dollars, tens of thousands of, maybe hundreds.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

How much thousands of dollars?

[Robert Krulwich]

50.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

A million dollars. And then some more than a million.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dollars because they wouldn't be taxed as high.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

But this is about more than just business. This is about more than Saturday morning cartoons. This is about what it means to be a human.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you mean?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, think about it. They have to convince government officials that under US Law, these characters are not considered human. Ooh. So Sherry and Indy headed to customs. Customs headquarters in D.C. with a giant bag full of superheroes.

[Indy Singh]

We actually went down there, we had a meeting. We brought samples of all the items, and.

[Jad Abumrad]

You brought action figures, you mean?

[Indy Singh]

We did. We had 60 or 80 figures.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And one by one, we tried to.

[Indy Singh]

Convince them that these figures do not represent human being.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And believe it or not, this meeting ended up in a series of court cases that went on for 10 years.

[Jad Abumrad]

10 years.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Because where it got really complicated and interesting is when they got to Marvel's crown jewel, the X Men.

[Sherry Singer]

We really didn't even read the stories. Sherry and I were not familiar with comic books. Sherry.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, they should have, because it's a great story. I mean, the story of X Men is kind of about the next phase of human evolution. Regular parents having regular kids. But some of these kids around their awkward teen years start to develop these strange mutant powers.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the story is humans who mutate.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, that's what makes this so legally tricky. I mean, are these characters still human, or have they evolved somehow out of humanness into something entirely different?

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, the government says that all of the imported action figures, that they are representations of human beings. If they have things like a head, a mouth, eyes, nose, hair, arms, torso, breasts, muscles. If you look at any of these guys, Cyclops, he has all the basic elements that are the government's definition of a human being. And what do you say?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, eventually, to make their point, Sherry and Indy pulled out a blue, furry guy that X Men Fans might know as Beast.

[Indy Singh]

We can look at Beast that we won early on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, he's called Beast, even customs.

[Sherry Singer]

But he has a head. He has a head. He has two arms, he has two legs.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

He does have those.

[Sherry Singer]

He wears glasses in response to Robert's comments.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you know, Beast in the X Men storyline, he's a pretty, he's a pretty like sophisticated guy. Like, he's, he's a thoughtful intellectual. Am I right, Ike?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Yeah. He would be the first X Men to.

[Robert Krulwich]

He wears glasses.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

He quoted Shakespeare.

[Robert Krulwich]

He quotes Shakespeare.

[Jad Abumrad]

He quotes Shakespeare.

[Robert Krulwich]

He ne' er so vile this day shall gentle his condition. And men in England now abed will count their manhoods cheap. So don't you think that puts him well down the human sort of bell curve?

[Sherry Singer]

Well, in this case, our argument would be is human beings do not have blue skin. The judge agreed it doesn't resemble a human being.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's. There are human beings of bluish skin.

[Joe Liebman]

You should know least is harder to fit into the mold of what we customarily know as human.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

That's Joe Liebman. He worked on the case for the government side.

[Joe Liebman]

He has aspects that perhaps are closer.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

To the monster, but it gets trickier. Take the most popular X Man. Oh, who's that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Wolverine.

[Joe Liebman]

Wolverine, he's got muscular arms and legs.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

He puts on a coat and a flannel shirt and he's a logger.

[Joe Liebman]

Sure.

[Sherry Singer]

But the eyes, they just didn't look human. And that's what our basic.

[Indy Singh]

And the claws also.

[Sherry Singer]

And the claws.

[Robert Krulwich]

Metal claws, razor like adamantium claws.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

In the story, a mad scientist implanted them in his arms, under his skin.

[Jad Abumrad]

But that just means he's a guy who had a little augmentation.

[Indy Singh]

No.

[Joe Liebman]

Well, he's developed something we don't know to actually exist.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

That does not mean that it might not exist in future humans in a.

[Joe Liebman]

World that we have not yet seen.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Joe's basic point is don't rule it out. He pointed to this runner, Oscar Pistorius.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

They call him the Blade Runner. The world's fastest man on no legs.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

The double amputee runner from South Africa who wears prosthetic legs that some people claim actually increase his speed, saying his.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

Prosthetics had more spring than human legs.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And some people say he should be disqualified from competing against able bodied humans.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

The body that governs track and field banned him from competition.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, forget about augmentation. What if we're just talking mutation? I mean, as a human we have about 20,000 genes and if one of.

[Robert Krulwich]

Them just gives you claws. That doesn't mean that the other 19,999 genes are keeping you pretty much in the human classification.

[Sherry Singer]

I studied. My undergraduate degree is in microbiology and biochemistry. So I know that we have mutations going on in our body constantly.

[Jad Abumrad]

So we're all mutants.

[Sherry Singer]

But in common language and in science fiction, when you use the word mutant.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

She says, you mean something or someone that's disfigured, alien that's no longer like us. So colloquially, if Marvel calls the X Men mutants, then they are not human.

[Robert Krulwich]

On the Wolverine case, did you win or lose?

[Sherry Singer]

We won.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

We won. Well, how do you feel about this, Ike? I don't know. I. I'm kind of seeing red. No, but seriously, here's the thing. In the X Men universe, all the X Men are trying to do is fit into our world. I don't want to hurt you, Eric.

[Jad Abumrad]

I never did.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

To feel like a human being.

[Bryan Singer]

Is it the truth?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Marvel Comics has created this world where mutants want to be treated like humans and the government is persecuting them as monsters. But in the real world, it's exactly the opposite. You got Marvel saying they're monsters, and you got the government saying, no, let them be human.

[Bryan Singer]

In the X Men universe, humans are very often out to get the mutants. Dismissive of the mutants, fearful of the mutants, liquidating them, experimenting on them.

[Robert Krulwich]

First of all, tell us who you are.

[Bryan Singer]

I am Bryan Singer. I'm a filmmaker.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Brian directed a bunch of the X Men movies.

[Bryan Singer]

X Men 1, X Men 2, X Men United.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And he says all the movies at their heart are parables about living in a world where you don't fit, where you're not the right category. In fact, the first X Men film he directed, the US Government fears mutants so much that this US Senator puts forward legislation called the Mutant Registration Act.

[Bryan Singer]

Mutants are very real, and they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, we must know what they.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Can do that us, them, conflict is key to the entire saga.

[Bryan Singer]

Well, yeah, and it's no coincidence that it was born during the height of the civil rights movement.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, so this is like. So this is modeled, then, on a moment in world history where people were trying to figure out how to either get along or not get along.

[Bryan Singer]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

This tension plays out within the mutants themselves, where you have two groups, the X Men, who choose to take the.

[Bryan Singer]

Stance to defend a world that hates and fears them.

[Robert Krulwich]

Don't give up on them, Eric.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And then you got this other group of mutants led by Magneto.

[Bryan Singer]

What would you have Me do Charles. And he doesn't have faith that humanity's ever going to embrace mutants. We are the future, Charles, not them. They no longer matter. He saw that. What happens when you're different is you get rounded up, experimented on, eliminated, and you're gassed.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

It's interesting to hear you describe that because when I walked out of the most recent movie, I felt such a strong, maybe a stronger connection with Magneto. After you saw what he went through.

[Bryan Singer]

Yeah. You see the intimate victimization of him and you root for him because he's ultimately facing a monster.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

And when he was making these movies, he had that monster of intolerance and prejudice on his mind. And it was actually pretty personal to him.

[Bryan Singer]

There's a photo album my family has, and it starts in the 20s. And I was looking through it and I recognized the lineage. And then there were a few pages of just these portraits of different people. I didn't know who they were. And I said to my dad, I'm like, who are these people? And my dad goes, they're all gone. They're the ones that are gone from Poland. They're just all gone. They're erased. There's no records, there's no property, there's no nothing.

[Robert Krulwich]

So he doesn't even know their name?

[Bryan Singer]

No, we just know that they're people that were part of the neighborhood and the family in the 30s that never left Poland like my grandparents did and disappeared.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Well, I know this sounds pretty heavy for a comic book, but over the years, the X Men have been a stand in for first the civil rights movement of the 60s. And most recently, the story works as an allegory for gay rights.

[Bryan Singer]

In fact, In X Men 2, we actually had a coming out scene.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

In the scene, this kid, Bobby Drake, he's hiding some of the X Men in his parents house.

[Bryan Singer]

And then his parents come home and find him with these strangers.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Aren't you supposed to be at school? Bobby, who is this guy?

[Bryan Singer]

And he is forced basically to show his parents that he's a mutant.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

There's something I need to tell you. Everyone takes a seat in the living room. And Bobby, using his special mutant powers.

[Bryan Singer]

He freezes a little cup of coffee. And the parents react in panic.

[Robert Krulwich]

Bobby.

[Bryan Singer]

And the mother actually says, have you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tried not being a mutant?

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Bryan Singer]

Like it's a choice.

[Robert Krulwich]

We have to find out what the ultimate legal disposition of this case was.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So did they in the end say that these characters were human or did they perpetuate this retail bigotry, Ike. And say that they were non humans.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

You guys really want to know?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, we have to know.

[Jad Abumrad]

We have to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Come on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, exactly. Tell us.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Non humans.

[Jad Abumrad]

Seriously?

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

Eventually, the judge ruled that all Marvel heroes, not just the X Men, are not human.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hmm. So Sherry and Indy won.

[Indy Singh]

We're not civil rights lawyers.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

So when you're. When you're having your nice meal after the. After the case, and you don't feel at all that you have just robbed humanity from a whole population?

[Indy Singh]

No, we had absolutely no guilt at all. Like, none.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, thank you, Ike.

[Ike V. Khandaraja]

You're welcome, Jeff.

[Robert Krulwich]

That would be Ike's V. Khandaraja, our reporter on this story. We also had a fine producer, Matthew.

[Jad Abumrad]

Kielty, who has just left us for greener pastures. Thank you, Matt.

[Robert Krulwich]

I am Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And I am Chad Apumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And thanks for listening, whatever you may be.

[Mary from Douglas, Wyoming]

Message one. Hi, this is Mary from Douglas, Wyoming. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about phone at www.phone.org. end of message.