Jessica Jones: A Window into the Black Experience

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Jessica Jones really trojan horsed me. In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting to be analyzing or looking for deeper meanings within some random show I was watching with my parents. Nonetheless, by season two I found myself noticing parallels between the ‘superhuman experience’ within the show and the ‘black experience’ in the United States.

In the show, Jessica Jones lives in a society where humans can be categorized into one of two groups: superhuman and human. Jessica herself is superhuman, and because of this, she experiences things that the average human definitely wouldn’t. From jumping off of buildings to saving children from oncoming cars, Jessica Jones seemed to be the perfect example of a superhero. Sadly, a tragic event in her led her to develop an addiction to alcohol, which inevitably led to her quitting heroism altogether. To compensate, she opened her own Private Investigation firm. Overall, the show follows Jessica and her crazy experiences as a PI; but today I want to talk about another aspect of the series, its parallels to the real world.

Like I said before, Jessica is superhuman. In her society, being superhuman comes with some advantages and disadvantages. Not only does Jessica often experience microaggressions and flat out rude comments, but she is also majorly discriminated against. Because of this, I can’t help but compare the superhuman experience in this show to the black experience in the United States. Allow me to explain with a few examples.

Firstly, in season two, there is a scene where someone is murdered outside of Jessica’s apartment building. She lives in a huge NYC apartment building with lots of other tenants, but when the cops arrive they start asking people where Jessica was. Not asking if they had seen anything suspicious, but instead where Jessica was. Unsurprisingly, Jessica was at a bar and didn’t have anything to do with the murder. Nonetheless, when Jessica returns to her apartment (clearly drunk from spending her evening at the bar) she is violently arrested on the spot. No evidence, no witnesses, nothing. Of course, this is just a TV show and everything is overexaggerated for entertainment purposes, but I think the message that it sends is very important. Not only did the police profile Jessica as a criminal, but they also shoved her to the ground and handcuffed her very violently when arresting her. To me, this is a clear nod to the black experience in the United States. Although not every black person is being racially profiled and shoved to the ground by police, many are; and at a much higher rate than other racial groups.

Additionally, there is another scene (this time in season 3) where Jessica’s mother (who also has superpowers) is being mistreated by law enforcement. In this scene, Jessica goes to visit her mother in the prison where she is being held. When Jessica asks for some privacy to speak to her mom alone, the police prison guards refuse. Jessica states that this is a clear violation of her right to privacy, and the police respond with ‘those rules don’t apply to your people’. Like the previous example, this is a hyperbole of the very real struggles that African-Americans face in the USA, specifically relating to police misconduct.

Overall, I feel that Jessica Jones does an amazing job of highlighting the injustices within our society, and it was extremely refreshing for me to watch a show that was so socially aware.