If you remove the supernatural elements of the scene, it is just a chilling and accurate representation of the harassment black men are on the receiving end of every day. Pierce is a stand-in for the average black man who must practice restraint daily, lest his rage at the subjugation dealt onto him become too much. If he makes one move that an officer of the law deems “too aggressive”, his life could be forfeited in retribution.

—

My senior year of high school, I was driving home from a friend’s house around midnight. I was changing the radio station when red and blue lights flashed behind me. An officer searched asked me for my license and registration. I remember him saying he was suspicious of me driving under the influence. As he ran my registration, all I can remember was that my hands were hard to see in the dark of that night. The steering wheel shook uncharacteristically until I realized that it was my hands that were unstill. My whole body was shivering with fear. This was the moment your parents always warned you of. When you had to be on your best behavior. “Yes officer, no officer.”

If you behaved perfectly, everything would be alright. Maybe. No wrong moves and you could be on the way home with a ticket. This would be unfortunate but at least you got to keep your life. Black Lightning’s depiction of the everyday practice of self-restraint in the black community resonated with me because later during that encounter, when I was on the hood of that state trooper’s cruiser facing arrest from “possession of marijuana” (I’ve never smoked drugs nor held them in my hands in my life), all I could feel was rage and fear. I raged at the idea that I was being profiled and accused of a crime that I had certainly not committed. I was fearful that if I showed that rage in even the most minute way, my family would be tasked with identifying a body in the morning instead of sending me off to school. Just as Jefferson Pierce, with all of his awesome power, retreated into himself in the face of an institution that is routinely rewarded for removing black men from the world, I retreated. “Yes officer, no officer.”

Black Lightning is by no means a perfect show. But it is a compelling depiction of life in the black community and of the monumental stress placed on people of color as they navigate the normal problems in life while also being systematically oppressed by a society that doesn’t value their lives. It’s an important show that merits watching for white people who may never have been exposed to the realities that are presented in the show, despite its heighted elements. It’s an important show for black communities because it normalizes our experiences and most powerfully, lets us know we are not alone in our struggles.

When I was a first-year in high school, I would pick my seven-year old brother up from our suburban neighborhood’s elementary school. He frustrated me so much; he always walked ten steps in front of me or ten steps behind. He never seemed to be able to keep the pace. One day, our normal routine was interrupted. For the first time I could ever recall, my little brother matched me stride for stride. “Alex?” I remember the trepidation in his voice. I can still hear the subtle shift, youth turned to uncertainty. “Am I brown?” The triviality of the question was amusing. Off-putting. “Is that bad?” And his path diverged from the carefree curiosity of childhood. From the series of wide-eyed experiments that compose his hypothesis of life. And I didn’t know how to answer. Our father didn’t know how to answer. And in 2018, in the midst of our national remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. and his message, I wonder what the answer is…

…

When I think about the morality of brownness, it occurs to me that I don’t get to assign an answer to the question. The President of the United States, our President, Donald Trump, recently asked “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” The countries in question included Haiti, which is comprised of 95% people of color . When the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, makes iridescently racist comments like this, I know that the question is answered for me. The answer is assigned to me, my brother, my father, and every other person of color that passes the majority on the street, with their bags tightly and suddenly clenched against their chests. The answer is assigned when we slow down, create separation, reduce tension as we walk behind the unquestioned at night on their way home.

…

There are moments in our lives when we are irreversibly changed from the moments preceding. It could be a parent’s bond disintegrating in front of their child’s unmarred eyes. It could be the unexpected loss of a loved one. For my brother, it was his innocence that floated into the void on the day he asked the question, dutifully following his shattered sense of self. Behind, an awareness of his otherness, his brownness, filled the space in the tiny pocket of his soul where his sameness, his personhood, departed. On days like today, when our national consciousness deigns it appropriate time to romanticize and politicize MLK’s lifelong pursuit of personhood, I wonder when my brother’s actions answer his question. I wonder if someday our State, as a people, will finally match MLK’s stride for stride, never ten steps ahead, never ten behind.

During a recent trip back home, I stared out of the window of the passenger side of my mom’s car as the wind rushed by in muted winter blurs. We were passing my elementary school and its surrounding playground. The playground seemed unfamiliar to me in so many ways.

In my youth’s mind’s eye, the playground resembled a grandiose kingdom home to so many scenes of my favorite movies and books. I remember entering the small inlet (and curiously haphazardly placed weak spot) to the trench run of the Death Star in my X-Wing starfighter, not hunching down into the archway leading down the park’s plastic slide. The balance beam connecting the jungle gym and the seesaw platform was a recreation of Indiana Jones’ leap of faith in The Last Crusade, not some weathered metallic prism.

During our recesses, my classmates and I assumed the mantles of our favorite heroes. We would all rush from the classroom to pick which character we’d pretend to be that afternoon and proudly proclaim “That’s me!”. But in retrospect, my memories of those adventures were just as amorphously flawed as my recollection of the playground. I was never my favorite hero in these reenactments. To my classmates, I could not be Luke Skywalker, closing his eyes and tapping into the mystic lifeblood of the universe as I vanquished the evil Empire and its seriously poorly constructed planet destroyer. No, my classmates told me I had to be Lando Calrissian. Lando. I didn’t want to be Lando. No one wanted to be Lando. Lando betrayed his best friend to a psychotic humidifier to save his own skin (you could argue he was trying to save Cloud City and its people but I offer that the moral implication of these types of hero’s journeys is that they always do the right thing, no matter how badass Boba Fett’s armor is)!

But, no matter how much I argued that judging a person’s suitability for a role solely off what they looked like certainly disqualified Andrew from being Luke (he had a peanut-head, a kitchen sink buzzcut and wore glasses with lenses thicker than bottle caps (and no I’m not still upset about it)), it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to my classmates because square pegs went in square holes and black kids played black characters. That line of thinking was dissociative to me because the way I saw it, yes, square pegs did go into square holes, but no one said the blue square couldn’t fit in the same hole as the red square. The point was, my blackness precluded me from a role as Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, or any other of our canon’s greatest heroes. The point is, representation matters.

I am reminded of these moments because it is now 2018 and the last few years we have seen the cultivation of several movements that has changed the way little brown boys and girls perceive themselves on the schoolyard playgrounds. We have Finn (portrayed with the kind of charisma you’d get if you crossed the goofiness of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Will Smith with wounded self-seriousness of Michael B. Jordan’s Vince in Friday Night Lights) as a primary character in one of the most popular film franchise in history, Star Wars. Creed depicted an image of black emotional mettle contrasted with a punishing manifestation of physical strength. Hell, there’s even a black Spider-Man now, Miles Morales, whose feature film debut is set for later this year in the animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Even just looking at the first week of 2018, blackness in pop culture is approaching a prevalence I have never been witness to. The most heavily promoted movie during the recent College Football Playoffs on New Year’s Day (ESPN reported that over 26 million people watched the Auburn-Alabama game) was Black Panther, a superhero movie about a character whose name invokes the ideology of a political party whose belief system hinged on black strength and pride. The commercial spots showed scenes of an all-black cast dapping each other up in ways that have never been represented in a movie of this commercial size. These scenes breed comradery amongst black people of all ages. More importantly, this movement toward the normalization of black humanity in the cultural zeitgeist lends validity to the notion that all our pegs fit snuggly into the same hole, even if they look a bit differently than generally presented.

These examples of black representation in popular culture move me in ways that would probably cause the version of me still running around with his friends on the playground to collapse into a small coma. Despite these developments, there is still quite a lot of work remaining. There has been a conspicuously leering lack of prominent black female characters in film but there isn’t a lack of capable actresses. Consider that even earlier in this article I was unable to name Lupita N’yongo’s character in Black Panther without doing research (she plays a formidable warrior named Nakia, if you were interested). In fact, her most prominent film role since her Academy-Award winning performance in 12 Years A Slave was Maz Kanata, a 100% CGI character in Star Wars that had very few minutes of screen time in both new Star Wars films. It is incredible that actors of color are getting opportunities to work high profile pieces of culture. It’s something that happened sparingly when I ran through the jungle gym. It would just be nice if the children who look like me got to see the actors that look like them, instead of their hued likenesses being hidden behind motion capture obfuscation.

In spite of all of the concerns for greater representation among all racial groups, the progress made so far is a hopeful indicator that the next generation of little black boys will run out on the playground to claim FN-2187 as their avatar for the afternoon. There’ll be no question when they declare “That’s Me!”.