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  • “Be Real Black For Me”:Lincoln Clay and Luke Cage as the Heroes We Need
  • Samantha Blackmon (bio)

The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen race and race relations in the United States of America return to days of Freedom Riders, Jim Crow laws, and (figurative if not literal) cross burnings in the night. In 2016 we saw a response to these things come out of the pop culture genre. While one of these responses is specifically a game, Mafia III, the other comes to us from the Marvel comic universe via Luke Cage. I argue that while the super-/anti-heroes depicted in these narratives (Lincoln Clay and Luke Cage respectively) may not be the heroes that we are accustomed to seeing in video games or comics (they are Black, brash, and fighting for a community of people of color), they are the heroes that we need at this moment. Clay and Cage offer consumers of the media the opportunity to view Blackness critically through the lens of their bodies, their connections to the community, their families, and the women around them. Used as a foil for the men in these narratives, the women come to the fore and are seen in relief.

Music is central in the narratives of these two men. In Mafia III, music builds the environment, and the radio plays constantly in the cars that Lincoln Clay drives. Every episode of Luke Cage is named after a contemporary rap song, and the music serves as an auditory backdrop for all of his interactions (both violent and not). Because of the centrality of the music in these narratives, each of the sections of my analysis also calls upon its own song, and I start each with a snippet of the lyrics.

You know how much I need youTo have you, really feel youYou don’t have to change a thingNo one knows the love you bringBe real black for me

—“Be Real Black For Me,” performed by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, 1972

Be Real Black for Me

2016 brought us 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. Protagonists so culturally [End Page 97] Black that their existence is more deeply embedded in Black culture than the pop culture canon.

Luke 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 led there by forces greater than themselves. Cage’s catalyst is the death of a noble father figure named Pops who 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...

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