-By Warner Todd Huston
On Tuesday night, the CW network debuted a new TV superhero show called “Black Lightning.” But, while the show was pretty good, the lack of outrage over its very title shows the essential hypocrisy of the social justice warrior set.
The show is set in an inner-city neighborhood filled with a mounting crime problem, growing frustration with police and police brutality, and gang warfare. In this troubled town lives high school principal Jefferson Pierce (series star Cress Williams), a pillar of the community but a man with a divorced wife and two girls attending his school.
Even as he is a community leader, Mr. Pierce has a secret past. We soon discover he was once an inner city vigilante named Black Lightning; a man somehow imbued with the power to wield electrical arcs and affect the electrical systems of cars and buildings. Seven years ago Pierce used his power to stop bad cops, kill drug pushers, and put dangers criminals out of commission. But since that time, Pierce had hung up his super suit to become a schoolteacher and to stay alive in order to try and win back a wife who left him because she was tired of him risking his life being a superhero.
Naturally, the new drug pushers and gang members in town begin messing with his family, and Black Lightning has to make a comeback setting the stage for a new era of superhero drama.
For a first episode, the show was actually pretty good. Set in the real world (well, aside from the superpowers bit) Black Lightning/Jefferson Pierce comes off as a Charles Bronson vigilante if Bronson got tired of all the killing, never lost his wife to a murderer’s bullet, and became a school teacher with his vigilantism still simmering under the surface.
The writing was tight and thankfully avoided any overly PC preaching while presenting too familiar inner city troubles in a frank, yet straightforward manner. Refreshingly, the viewer did not feel beat over the head with Black Lives Matter-styled propaganda, at least for this series opener, anyway.
Thus far, reviews are enthusiastic. The show has already received a 100 percent rating on the movie nerd site Rotten Tomatoes, for instance. And Entertainment Weekly praised the episode saying that it was a superhero show “with something to say.”
Even chief social justice warrior Shaun King was singing the show’s praises on Twitter. In fact, another social justice star, hack liberal “journalist” Roland Martin, even had a bit part on the show as a TV commentator giving “Black Lightning” his social justice street cred.
On premiere night, China Anne McClain, the actress that plays daughter Jennifer Pierce, was excited that her new show was the number one trending Twitter topic on premiere night.
OH SNAP YAAALLL ALREADY TRENDING #1 WORLDWIDE!! #BLACKLIGHTNING !!!!! @CressWilliams @NafessaWilliams @ChristineAdams @TheCW pic.twitter.com/ITr2YskR8D
— China⁷ (@chinamcclain) January 17, 2018
But while many complained about that the titular lead’s superhero costume was not like the comic book version — a perennial sore spot for comics fans assessing filmed superhero shows — no one was complaining about the obvious problem with the show: its very name.
After all, why does it have to be “Black” Lightning? Why can’t it just be “Lightning”? Isn’t this the sort of thinking the left indulges?
Wouldn’t the left claim it is “racist” to have to specifically put “black” in an African American superhero’s name? After all, is The Flash the “White Flash”? Is Aquaman the “Ginger Fish”? Is Wonder Woman “Whiter Woman”?
Now, in any other context, social justice warriors would be attacking this show simply because of the “racist” move of a name so condescendingly revealing that a black character is black instead of “just a hero.”
But, because this show empowers the black family, praises education, and makes a black man a literal hero, the SJWs are happy to ignore something that they would otherwise go crazy to condemn.
It just shows that the “rules” are fluid and can be suspended whenever the SJWs think it is advantageous to cast aside their carefully cultivated rulebook.
It reminds of the kerfuffle that white actress and purported women’s rights activist Alyssa Milano got into this week. Milano normally loses her mind when a male mansplains things to a woman, but she didn’t mind it much at all this week when President Trump’s DHS chief, Kirstjen Nielsen, was blatantly disrespected by several Democrat Senators in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. When the woman getting harangued by a man was a member of Trump’s cabinet, Milano was suddenly proclaiming that a tough woman should be able to take a partisan attack or two and the actress blew off people’s outrage over the treatment. Nice double standard, that.
With Milano, we once again we see a left-winger conveniently ignoring the SJW “rules” when it is necessary to push liberalism over principle.
In any case, without a doubt this debut episode was a well-done bit of entertainment. It had a good message, was well written and acted, and set the show up for some good drama going forward. But, it does tend to reveal the disconnect among social justice warriors.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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