In the Cage

I watched episode one of Luke Cage - the new Netflix Marvel Universe show. And I had a very sophisticated response.

Man, I thought. This show is black!

I mean, really black. Virtually every character is black, doing black guy stuff, with other black guys. Hanging tough in the barbers. Doing gangster stuff and sexy talk in night clubs. Looking like Shaft. That kind of thing*. Even the camera angles seemed black. How did they do that? How are camera angles black?

It shouldn't be weird, should it? Watching a show in which there are hardly any white characters shouldn't be weird for me, living here in the multi-platform, culturally diverse media landscape of the 21st Century. But it is. It's a bit weird.

Checking my privilege

About half way through a white guy shows up. "Ah!" I thought. "This is probably the hero!" No, I didn't. Calm down. But actually a tiny bit of my brain did go "At last - someone a bit like me." Not a particularly pleasing part of my brain, I'll admit. But it's there.

Jessica Jones did a similar thing, with women. It filled the screen with interesting, complicated women who have their own lives outside of the nonsense of men. And most of the male characters were... well, they were regular men. Not the super powerful, cool, controlled guys of fiction. But weak, often unreliable idiots. Like me.

And there I sit, pleased that people are making shows like this, but slightly thrown off balance. I've been taught, over years and years of film, television and video games, that stories are about white guys like me. We're the heroes. There may be women and non white characters, but they exist in orbit around the main focus of attention. Me.

Even those men in Jessica Jones feel wrong. There I am, being represented on screen, upsettingly well. Spiteful, vain, confused by girls.  But that's doesn't feel right, because I want to be represented by some amazing, powerful protagonist. Surely that's who I am? Yeah? Yeah? Anyone? No?

The other half

So here's a wonderful and disconcerting experience. This must be, a bit, what it's like to be non-white and watch most television. Or to be a woman, I guess. This must be what it's like to be faced, all the time, with a sea of male white faces in most television programmes and films and games. To feel like you don't quite belong in this story.

Of course, my thoughts on this are probably a little patronising. I don't have any real sense of what it is like to be non-white or non-male, and being slightly weirded out by a bit of TV does not make me One with the Sisterhood, or the Brothers. (Are they things? Sisterhoods? Brothers? I'm sure I read that somewhere.)

But I do think it's something that more people could be aware of, especially privileged guys like me. Next time some idiot wonders why there isn't an International Men's Day (except there is), or a Straight Pride parade, or why it isn't All Lives Matter. Maybe they'd do well to remember this:

We live in an unequally balanced world. Representation is hugely skewed towards an idea of white, male and heterosexual as 'normal'. A little bit of rebalancing is probably a good idea.

And as game designers, and writers, and indeed as people, we should take a bit of responsibility for that.





*I feel duty bound to point out that I don't consider 'being a gangster' to be a core component of being black. It's part of the idea of 'blackness' that the show is playing with. That's clear, right? Yeah. Thought so.