Be Real Black For Me: Luke Cage and Lincoln Clay as the Heroes We Need

You know how much I need you
To have you, really feel you
You don’t have to change a thing
No one knows the love you bring

Be real black for me
– “Be Real Black For Me,” Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway (1972)

Over the course of the last week we have seen the release of two of the Blackest protagonists pop culture has ever seen, Marvel’s Luke Cage and Mafia III‘s Lincoln Clay, and they are the heroes we need right now. Unapologetically Black as fuck. Protagonists so Black that their existence is more deeply embedded in Black culture than pop culture canon.

biggiecrownLuke Cage is more about tributes to Trayvon Martin, Harlem, 90s hip hop culture, the rise of the crack game, and cold cans of Colt 45 on hot days than the Marvel universe, references to “The Incident” are secondary. Cage’s struggles don’t feel like the struggles of superhero, but more specifically the struggles of a Black superhero. One who fights to protect the people of his community and abhors the use of the word nigga/nigger even under the guise of re-appropriation. Luke Cage is a hero that fights because of his Blackness, not in spite of it. He fights to preserve Black culture in the form of corner barbershops as safe havens, neighborhood small business owners, Black churches, and the souls of Black folks in general.

While Luke Cage can arguably serve as a critical look at Blackness in the age of Black Lives Matter and extreme police violence (signature black hoodie and all), Mafia III offers us some insight into America’s history of racism and the rampant destruction of Black bodies by focusing on life in the American South in 1968. With Mafia III‘s Lincoln Clay we find ourselves shifting from Luke Cage, framed law enforcement officer and scientific test subject turned superhero to abandoned, ex-street hustler turned military hero, turned mobster vigilante (and anti-hero). For both Cage and Clay (who ironically both bear the initials L.C.) their paths are chosen for them and they are lead there by forces greater than themselves. Cage’s catalyst is the death of a noble father figure named Pops who has turned his own life around to become a positive force in the community. Clay is spurred on by the murder of the family that took him in after he was abandoned and placed in an orphanage as a young child. In the case of both men, it boils down to the notion of “Family First,” which is a phrase that we hear multiple times during the first season of Luke Cage. For these men it is avenging of family and the values that they embody that makes them heroic in some way.

lincoln_clayIn the case of Luke Cage his heroism is clear, he is fighting murderous, gun-running criminals. But it is not so clear in the case of Clay who is, for all intents and purposes, a criminal himself, and not the framed or mistaken criminal that we see in Cage, but an actual active member of a mob family family bent on revenge. He is more of an accidental hero. The kind of hero who is willing to break any and every law on the books to serve his needs and the needs of the Black people of New Bordeaux. And perhaps this willingness to ignore the law is what makes him another vision of the the hero that we need in this moment.

In his essay “Ralph Ellison and the Birth of the Anti-Hero” (1968), William J. Schafer writes of the creation of the Black anti-hero in the novel Invisible Man ,

The novel repeats the essential Negro experience in several ways; the overall four-part pattern might be read (albeit overly allegorically) as “emancipation,” “industrialization,” “organization,” and “disintegration”; or the pattern may portray the violent urbanization of a rural Negro consciousness; but the linking of the general Negro experience with an individual viewpoint and voice is accompanied through the repetition of the invisible man’s failure and his cumulative descent into despair…Every  effect in the novel is aimed at showing the inside of the nameless invisible man; we are well below the skin level, and Ellison does not attempt to explain the Negro’s experiences or to blame society for them but to show how he is affected, what the view is from the inside the prison of blackness and invisibility.

t-martinThe patterns of the Black experience that we see in Luke Cage and Mafia III‘s narrative are strikingly similar. At the point that the narratives arcs for these men we see them rebuilding, reclaiming, and being revived after they have lost all it is that they have to lose, their families (and through them, their selves). Through these losses we are able to see into the hero and view their weakness, not their physical weakness, but the weakness that is left by a lifetime of systemic racism. In that space we see the rape of slave women, the sale of their progeny, the rise of the Klan and Jim Crow Laws, the Civil Rights struggle, the effect of heroin and crack on the Black community, the meteoric rise (and subsequent fall) of hip-hop kings and queens…and beautiful Black children, men, and women dying in the streets at the hands of racist law enforcement. And it is also in that space that we see that we (the viewers and players) have also come to our lowest of points and that there is one direction that we can go at this point (but that there may be more than one way to propel us “Always Forward”).

For all of these reasons and so many more Luke Cage and Lincoln Clay are the heroes that we need at this moment, heroes steeped in a violent history that includes rape, abandonment, scientific experimentation, and murder. Heroes who have been tried by the fucking fire and who have come out on the other side not only whole, but better than. Made something greater by surviving all of the atrocities that a racist world has heaped upon them. They have survived the unsurvivable and have come back bigger, Blacker, and more powerful than ever.

Ultimately Luke Cage and Lincoln Clay remind us of what Roberta Flack and Donna Hathaway taught us 44 years ago…that Black is Beautiful.


This is the first in a series of posts about Luke Cage and Mafia III. In the next post I will be considering the notion of family and gender.

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