Marvel’s “Luke Cage” series nearly broke the Internet the day it was released on Netflix.
Luke Cage, Marvel’s first black superhero, was created in the ’70s and has been made into a live-action TV show. The show, based in Harlem, features a majority-black cast. Surprisingly, some people took to Twitter to vent about the show’s lack of white characters.
Despite white people being the center of Hollywood entertainment for years, dating back to TV shows like “Bewitched” and “The Andy Griffith Show” to more recent shows like “Gossip Girl,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “How I Met Your Mother,” which all have a shortage of black characters, Marvel’s “Luke Cage” is being perceived as racist for having dynamic black characters.
Racist is a word that is thrown around way too much by people who don’t know its true meaning. For the show to be racist, it would have to show a belief that black people are superior to white people. After watching the entire opening season of “Luke Cage” in one weekend, I can vouch that there is no scene or instance in which a character was treating someone poorly because they were white or advocating for the mistreatment of white people.
I believe “Luke Cage” is seen as racist because it challenges people to think differently about a culture that they are not used to. The show conveys what it’s really like living in a black community with real problems like political corruption, poverty and violence. If you’ve never been exposed to a culture that is different from yours, it may be rattling at first, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort to understand it.
For quite some time now, Hollywood has had limited representation of black people, portraying them predominantly as uneducated or criminals. The characters in “Luke Cage” are seen as strong, intelligent people with room to develop and grow, unlike the flat characters portrayed by black people in other TV shows.
The DuVernay test was created by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis to monitor racial diversity in Hollywood. The DuVernay test requires African Americans and other minorities to have fully realized characters rather than serve as scenery in white stories. How many of the most watched TV shows or movies of our time could pass this test?
In the past, it has been up to TV channels like BET, Centric, TV One and OWN to give accurate representations of black life, culture and experiences, and I’m happy that Netflix is also falling into this category. Netflix has broken barriers by producing TV shows that go against Hollywood’s standards.
Netflix has not only put more black actors on screen but other Hollywood minorities, including Asians, Hispanics, Muslims and members of the LGBTQ community.
I’m sure the opinions of a few people are not fully representing how all white people feel about “Luke Cage,” but it’s good that conversations about diversity in Hollywood are happening. There are people of all races, ethnicities and religions in an audience and each of them deserve to have people on screen with whom they identify.