Luke cage was a Netflix Original Series based around the Marvel Character Luke Cage. It was in the same universe as all the other Netflix Marvel series, but this time it focused on the comic book character Luke Cage. For this post, I am going to focus on the first season as that is something I remember more than the other seasons. Luke Cage takes place in modern-day Harlem in New York City and in the series he uses his powers of unbreakable skin and super strength. He uses these powers to fight the crime in the city, with the main villain being Cottonmouth. This series is a fight for power in the streets of Harlem. Whether that be between Cottonmouth, Mariah, or Luke Cage, they are all trying to fight for their vision of the streets. The story portrayed black culture in a way that many TV series have not done and was the first Marvel property to portray black culture on screen. The main spot in the series was at Pop’s barbershop, a known neutral zone in Harlem. This series lets the viewer explore what the culture is like in Harlem while respecting and exploring new avenues of storytelling for a character that is often forgetting in the Marvel lineup. The struggle for power in the series is the main idea of the whole series as Luke Cage is “overpowered” when compared to those who oppose him. It’s all about how they can get more powerful to defeat him and take control of the streets of Harlem. This type of power struggle can be directly linked to the other arguments that we have looked at this semester. Luke Cage would be the “other” in the story because everyone is out to get him in the story. I feel like the creators were trying to make the viewers think about the motivations that the villains were experiencing. They explored Cottonmouth’s past, which was the best part of the first season, to fully try to explain the characters’ motivations and allowed the viewers to feel for him. It wanted to portray the struggles of Black Americans throughout their childhood and was exploring how that childhood can lead some down a dark path. 
Author: weiler.132
Podcast of Systemic Injustices by Jacob Weiler
Jacob Weiler 0:00
Hello, my name is Jacob Weiler. And this is my podcast for comparative studies 1100. For this podcast, I’m going to be discussing a diary of systemic injustice that I created earlier in the semester. And while I do that, I’m going to go further in detail with it, and try to make it more listenable in audio. For my diary of systemic injustice that I picked, it happened to be my third one, which happened to focus on discrimination against Asian Americans that have happened throughout our American history.
Jacob Weiler 0:33
While I’m not exactly the like, I don’t have first hand experience with this type of stuff, as I’m not an Asian American, I have done quite a bit of research as this was my diary systemic justice number three, and it was my diary of systemic injustice showcase I did earlier in the semester. So for a brief intro on this topic, the day that I decided to pick the systemic injustice, I looked at Twitter, and just to find some ideas on the topic of what I was going to do, because I tend to struggle but I, I came upon a hashtag. That was hashtag executive order 9066,
Jacob Weiler 1:12
which I just thought was a political trend of the day, which I tend to stay away from. But I clicked on out of curiosity, and I learned what the true meaning of it was. Executive Order 9066 was the order that was signed when America during World War Two, and it happened to imprison 1000s of Asian Americans into internment camps. If you don’t know what internment camps are, they are very comparable to,
Jacob Weiler 1:42
to like camps and Holocaust and things like that, while maybe not as extreme as that it’s on the same level, at least.
Jacob Weiler 1:51
And it was something that is a huge scar in the American conscience and reading about it was something that wasn’t exactly a pleasant read. But it was some It is something very educational.
Jacob Weiler 2:08
Now I’m going to try to give a brief history on the order. As I stated before, it was something that was signed right as America during World War Two, it was signed by President FDR and there really wasn’t anything done about it up until 1976, when President Gerald Ford made an order to prohibit prohibit anything like this from happening again. It was just an executive order, though. So technically, a president can overrule it. But history right now is showing that no president will because it’s just if you do, you’re just going to look like an absolute racist.
Jacob Weiler 2:45
And then there wasn’t a formal apology until 1988 when Ronald Reagan issued a public apology on behalf of the government and gave reparations to those who were put in internment camps along with their children. And this is from history.com, if you want to look it up or anything like that. And before this even went through the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court actually decided that it was okay to do which is baffling to me that they would ever think that this would be not something against human rights and against our freedoms as Americans. But they upheld it, which goes to show that not everything the Supreme Court says is always the best. But that’s why we have checks and balances, and the Congress and the President and all that stuff, yada, yada, yada. But
Jacob Weiler 3:35
on the other hand, that’s kind of the end of the history with it, there’s obviously still going to be some effects through families. But in terms of things that government has said about this, it’s been something that they’ve stayed relatively quiet about, as they are with many issues dealing with the government doing something against minorities in some way.
Jacob Weiler 3:55
But for me, this was something that was covered for maybe three days in my high school classes, and I was lucky enough to even hear about it because I had a good enough history teacher that who cared who literally just cared about this topic and wanted us to understand that the US government doesn’t always make perfect decisions, and that life’s a little more complicated than it seems. I realize that I definitely was in a lucky position to hear that because not many people I think I’ve heard about this and the fact that it was trending on Twitter just to give people some education on the subject really shows that not many Americans know about this. It’s similar to many other things that America did during World War Two and many other countries during World War Two where no country was really safe from doing something terrible. It just they happen to be overshadowed by the Nazis, obviously, who did the worst out everybody. Well, this tends to deal with the past. The reason I chose this for my
Jacob Weiler 5:00
systemic injustice at the time was it that was right around the time when the shooting at the spa happened in America, which was a big shock to me.
Jacob Weiler 5:10
Even though there has been quite a bit of shootings in America recently in general, which is terrible, but the shooting at the spa, many thought that it was racially motivated. And even if it wasn’t, it was a big,
Jacob Weiler 5:26
big thing that happened against a bunch of Asian Americans who all happened to be from the reports and everything, just regular day Americans who were just getting by and trying to feed their kids, which makes it even more horrible that this even happened. And if you don’t know I happened, it’s some guy went into a spa that was full of Asian American immigrants who had children, most of them, they’re mostly all women. And he happened to kill, I believe it was nine, I don’t have the exact numbers up on the screen. But it was eight, I just looked at it. But it had eight American, Asian American woman killed at a spa. And most of them were single mothers.
Jacob Weiler 6:12
I have a quote from Eric Park, which is the son of a victim who said that his mom was a “single mother who dedicated her whole life to providing for my brother and me,” which that story tends to be something that many Americans resonate with, because it’s kind of the American dream, quote, unquote, to fight for what you want, and to make money and to get your kids into a better place than you were in.
Jacob Weiler 6:41
But this leads to the bigger discussion that’s been happening around this is the endless amounts of racism towards Asian Americans in America.
Jacob Weiler 6:51
And towards Asians, in general, to anybody who looks Asian or anybody who is Asian tends to have some sort of stereotype put towards them, or in some more extreme cases, have just flat out racism, and of all types, like slang terms and all that stuff thrown towards them, which is especially ramped up in 2020, due to the Coronavirus and the remarks towards China. And for some reason, some rather stupid people, correlating
Jacob Weiler 7:28
China to all Asian people and their decisions to all Asian people, which tends to be something that is a very fringe idea, but there are definitely some that I’ve seen on the internet that think that and there’s some clips that you can look up online, of people saying this stuff, you can look it up if you want, but it’s it’s disappointing to see in the least, it’s something that’s not particularly, at least I don’t think not particularly it’s not good picture of most of America. But there is a real racism problem when it comes against Asian Americans. And most of the topics against about this shooting has been about what can we do to combat racism, racism, and the world, which has been not even just for Asian Americans. It’s been a topic for the past 2,3, 4, past 60 years, that America has been dealing with, with the skeletons in our closet, so to speak. And it’s something that
Jacob Weiler 8:31
has been getting, obviously better depending on which
Jacob Weiler 8:36
goggles you put on that day. And it’s something that will continue to hopefully get better with better education programs in schools.
Jacob Weiler 8:46
I think in my personal opinion, that is the only way to combat it is to if you’re gonna have racist parents, you gotta have something in school that teaches children to think Usually, the best way to make a racist person not racist, isn’t to flat out call them racist and say the wrong it’s more to open up their mind. And to,
Jacob Weiler 9:09
to think critically about what they’re just about the situation in general and why they shouldn’t be thinking like that. While this isn’t the fastest solution to the nation’s problem, it is one of the more effective ones when it comes to stopping it from creeping back up again. But I feel like in my opinion, and some other people would agree with me too.
Jacob Weiler 9:31
There definitely is a thing in our brain where we’re just some people at least are just wired to hate other people, which is something that would be very hard to get out at everybody. But I right now, I believe most of the of America, like the majority is not racist, but there’s a sizable chunk that happens to have some negative connotation against a certain race and the shooting at the spa kind of shows that there’s a lot of work to be done.
Jacob Weiler 10:00
on that front end, a lot of
Jacob Weiler 10:01
a lot of decisions need to be made. I don’t know whether the government should step in and start saying stuff. I think the government has definitely said a lot when it comes to that. And there can be arguments that the government and in the past four years has led to some of the negative connotations towards Asian Americans, especially, just due to how what Trump has said and things like that, which hasn’t been particularly enjoyable to hear. While he might not be racist, depending on what you look at definitely some, some conversations about it, that he had were not the best for people who are racist and definitely could be taken as ammo against Asian Americans. And
Jacob Weiler 10:52
hopefully, less situations like the ones that just recently happened at the spa. That hopefully stop happening, it’s just talking about just makes me kind of disappointed at this point. It’s just sad.
Jacob Weiler 11:07
So that’ll be the end of my podcast. Talking about this has made me very disappointed, and I’m kind of sad now. So, on that note, have a good day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
America’s History against Asian-Americans
For my third Diary of Systemic Injustices, I wrote about a hashtag that I saw trending on Twitter that day that piqued my interest. It was “#executiveorder9066” and I thought this was just some random order that the opposing side of politics hated enough to get it trending on Twitter. However, looking deeper it revealed something much darker than I had previously thought. Executive order 9066 is the horrific order by President FDR to put Asian-Americans in internment camps as the United States joined the conflicts of WWII. This executive order is one of the ugliest reminders of the racism from this era against Asian-Americans, who were persecuted based on actions they had to part in. Internment camps is a subject that many Americans don’t get to hear about as it’s something we as a culture have tried to hide in our closet with our other demons. It was something that was protected by even the Supreme Court and wasn’t “fixed” until 1976 when President Gerald Ford made an order to prohibit this from happening again. Then there wasn’t a formal apology until 1988 when President Ronald Reagan issued a public apology on behalf of the government and gave reparations to those who were put into internment camps along with their children (History.com).
Japanese-Americans Interned at Santa Anita (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Little did I know whenever I wrote about this trend, there would be a massive shooting against Asian-Americans that happened only a couple of weeks after. This horrific shooting is a terrifying reminder that the racism from years past is not completely gone and there are still those among us that are willing to kill a group of people based on preconceived notions about a race. This shooting killed 8 Asian-American women who all worked at a Spa, many of whom were single mothers. Erik Park, one of the sons of a victim, stated that his mom was “a single mother who dedicated her whole life to providing for my brother and me” (Feller). These killing have reignited the massive debate over gun control and have sparked discussion on the racism that still, unfortunately, exists in our country in 2021. It’s something that we have addressed in the past, but many argue that we haven’t done enough to combat racism and this may be proof that there is a lot of work that still needs to be done.
Spa that recent shooting occurred at.
Works Cited
Congress, Library of. “Japanese-Americans Interned at Santa Anita.” Getty Images, www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/japanese-americans-interned-at-santa-anita-news-photo/640461557?adppopup=true.
Feller, Madison. “Biden and Harris Visiting Atlanta in Wake of Spa Shootings.” ELLE, ELLE, 19 Mar. 2021, www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a35862694/asian-women-killed-atlanta-massage-parlor-shootings/.
History.com Editors. “FDR Orders Japanese Americans into Internment Camps.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-signs-executive-order-9066.
History and its borders – Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Context Presentation, Jacob Weiler)
In the early 1910s, two men single-handedly decided the border of all the middle eastern countries. These men were named Mark Sykes (British) and Francois Georges-Picot (French). They both negotiated and came up with the border of the modern-day middle eastern countries like Turkey and Syria. While they intended for their borders to mostly include only one group within them, their vision had not been correct and the borders they constructed ended up causing havoc in the region. To this day there is rampant brutality in the way these countries are ruled, and differences are not allowed (Osman). There are many views of what to do in the region now and they range on both extremes, leaders don’t want their country to lose any part of their land, and groups like ISIS want the borders gone altogether (Danforth).
The brutality in the region is an unseen side effect of these men’s decisions. The biggest source of contention in the region arises from the Kurdish people. These people are one of the world’s largest non-state nations (Hiltermann). They have been fighting for their independence ever since the borders had been drawn, but things like Iran deploying forces to prevent them from leaving countries like Iraq has led this to become a major issue and the Kurds do not have much help. Instead, groups like ISIS are trying to get rid of all countries, tainting the image of what the Kurds are trying to do and leaders can use this to express how the Kurds’ mission is bad.
This decision to change the borders has strongly influenced what Persepolis is about, the brutality of the Middle East Region. This can be directly linked to how those two men thought the region should be split and how their flawed views of the region allowed the whole history to become what it has today. The good news is that there will eventually be change but it won’t come from the world forcing the region to become what it wants. The region needs to go through its struggles so that when the tension is completed, the whole region will be less divided.
Works Cited
Danforth, Nick. “The Middle East That Might Have Been.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 9 Dec. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/the-middle-east-that-might-have-been/385410/.
Hiltermann, Joost. “The Middle East in Chaos: Of Orders and Borders.” Crisis Group, International Crisis Group, 25 May 2018, www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/middle-east-chaos-orders-and-borders.
Osman, Tarek. “Why Border Lines Drawn with a Ruler in WW1 Still Rock the Middle East.” BBC News, BBC, 14 Dec. 2013, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25299553.