There’s a piece in The New York Times Monday called, “A Father Confronts His ‘Spider-Verse’ Problem,” but we’ll be damned if we can figure out just what that problem is, although the tweet suggests a “deep structural flaw” in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

That just about says it all. We’ve read the piece, written by Lawrence Ware, diversity coordinator for Oklahoma State University’s philosophy department, and all we know is that he wants to discuss his problems with the film with his sons, but they’re just so into it. “We cannot expect kids to be as woke as we are,” he laments.

But again, we’re just not seeing in the piece what the big problem is — maybe you can figure it out from this excerpt:

Miles Morales, the first Afro-Latino Spider-Man, was the focus for the first half of the film, but, thereafter, he became a Spider-Man among Spider-Men. He was no longer the focus, and that puts me in a tough place as a father of young children.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” with its racially indelicate portrayals of black people in the form of the Skids and Mudflap characters, was an easy fix: I took away the film. They have not watched “Pocahontas” yet because the movie’s whitewashing of American history is too much for me — and, thankfully, the movie has not been requested. We’ve discussed why films like “Revenge of the Fallen” and “Pocahontas” are a problem, and when we talk about the kind of racial stereotypes those films present (the ghettoized machines of the former, and the noble Indians vs. the violent savage dichotomy of the latter) they usually shrug their shoulders and move on to the next toy.

But I could not imagine having a similar conversation with them about “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” They loved it too much.

Apparently the deep structural flaw is that there isn’t more Miles Morales in the movie? “I just wish there were less of [the other characters] and more of Miles,” he writes. And with that said, he’s going to allow his sons to love this “imperfect” film like his mother allowed him to love “the second Indiana Jones film despite the racism.”

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It’s a weird piece. If you’ve seen the film, feel free to dig through it to find out why it’s problematic.

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Tags: deep structural flawsdiversity officerInto the Spider-VerseMiles Moralesnew york timesSpider-Manwoke