We dont need another hero.
This is what happens when fantasy meets Trayvon Martin. Netflix

There is a good reason why my generally positive review of the new TV show Luke Cage, "In Praise of Black Women Who Get Things Done," has lots to say about its supporting cast of black and brown women and almost no words for its main subject, Cage, the beefy black man whose iron-tough skin cannot be punctured by standard bullets. That reason is this: I'm intellectually opposed to the whole idea and popularity of superheroes.

These fictional characters, which got their start in comic books, have some superpower that they use to help people in distress. They can either fly from here to there, or become a ball of fire, or invisible to the eye, or leap from rooftop to rooftop, or spin webs with their wrists, or just smash stuff. But the essential problem with a superpower is its imprisonment—meaning it is a power that's not open in a radical way but very much locked in an individual's body.

It only takes a moment's thought to realize that those who can benefit from a superhero's power have to be physically near it, near this one and only. Because the power cannot be without its body, its usefulness is spatially limited. If the hero is not there, he/she can't help you, because their strength or special thing is on the other side of town or it's fast asleep in some dingy apartment or secret lair. A superhero also has to know you are in danger. And they have to move from one crisis to the next with great speed. This condemns them to always arriving just in the nick of time, if they arrive at all. This will not do.

Also, the human is the animal whose success, whose true strength is found in its weakness—no sharp teeth, no horns, no claws, no great size. Because we are so weak, we are dependent on others and others are equally dependent on us. A human is a god to a human, wrote Spinoza, the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced. A society dominated by strong men or women would never become as social, and therefore as powerful as ours. We do not need people with special physical powers, but with special weaknesses. Einstein could barely hurt a fly. Also recall how useless a baby is. From this uselessness has emerged an animal that's displaced all other animals and claimed the top of the hill. Only in our weakness will we find solutions to our greatest challenges: gun violence, poverty, climate change.