I grew up in Harlem, 135th in Lenox Terrace. Names like Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel were associated with the floors they lived on and whether or not they hooked me up with the good candy on halloween. Sylvia’s was the place I hated having to run to once a week because my mom demanded takeout. Wilsons was the place with the good muffins that I’d get if I did well enough in school. It wasn’t until I left the city that I recognized that what I took as part of my daily droll was in fact a part of black history I should’ve felt honored to encounter. Then Luke Cage came along.
Cage director, Cheo Hodari Cooker first came to my attention for directing NCIS: Los Angeles. This show relaunched LL Cool J and created pivotal black male and female characters who were equals to each other and the other cast members around them. This is an important point, because generally speaking female and minority characters play an inferior role to white male counterparts on TV. When they don’t, the show often becomes about the fact that they don’t i.e. The Good Wife, How to Get Away With Murder, and of course, Empire. Cheo’s characters existed as equals in a world where race existed but the idea of equality was not seen as a focal construct.
Luke Cage flips the script again, creating a world where race is a focal construct but not in the sense of racial balance. Race here is seen from the point of view of black america, where we are constantly striving to better ourselves and to create a space in which to show the rich culture and history of our people and to highlight those who have created it. Most of the people in Luke Cage are black and as such it isn’t so much about being black vs. white but about what it means to be black in harlem.
And he really gets harlem right. He sees the harlem I grew up in, but he puts it on a pedestal that I did not see until long after I was gone. In the hero Cage himself Hodari crafts a streetwise Captain America who pays homage not only to black culture but to the weekend morning kung fu flicks and blaxploitation films that defined early African American cinema. Luke Cage is nothing if not an homage to black culture–both good and bad. Its titular hero is a hoodie wearing non-hero who is just trying to get by and stay out of trouble.
He doesn’t stay out of trouble. What he does is take another step forward in cementing the power of the Marvel-Netflix franchise, and reminding viewers that this is but one slice of a larger canvas filled with amazing heroes and stories to come.