Luke hates the word. When a teenage gangster puts a gun to Luke’s head in episode 2 , he seems irritated. He’s Mr. Bulletproof, after all — the weapon can’t make him bleed. He’s scoping out a fortress called Crispus Attucks, the Fort Knox of his antagonist Cottonmouth. The teen catches Luke scheming, and threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t leave. “What are you doing here, n----?” he asks. Luke’s annoyance is palpable. “Young man, I’ve had a long day. I’m tired,” he says.And then two strange things happen: “But I’m not tired enough to ever let nobody call me that word. You see a n---- standing in front of you? Across the street from a building named after one of our greatest heroes?” In three lines, Luke Cage conflates patriotism with respectability politics.This kind of thinking falsely dictates a path to Black achievement. Be Black, it suggests, but not Black in public — sagging pants, drop-out rates, senseless crimes, and the welfare state are all to blame for Black people’s problems. Conveniently, this "logic" says nothing about the prison industrial complex, the police state, educational disparity, or the housing discrimination that leaves people of color dependent on a state that destroys us. One part of this flawed ideology centers on the use of the N-word.This one word, is what’s holding us back, the politics of respectability decree. The rappers brought it back, and the kids are keeping it alive. If Black people stopped calling each other n----, all our problems would disappear.This ideology gets quite a bit of play on Luke Cage: Black Mariah is the mouthpiece, Luke is the muscle. Mariah needs cash to fund her “New Harlem Renaissance” project through city legislation. “Politics is where the power is, Cornell,” Mariah explains. The subtext here is that politics are where the white people are, and Black respectability prioritizes white comfort over Black realities. Cottonmouth disagrees: “When the smoke clears, it’s n----s like me that let you hold on to what you’ve got.” N----s — the people white America never sees coming, the people police want to shoot — are the real bastions of power, he counters.