"Racially Charged": Negotiating Black Politics on the Superhero TV Adaptation, Black Lightning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project takes Black Lightning as a case study of the representations of Black superheroes in comic book television adaptations. By focusing on the three main superheroes Jefferson Pierce/Black Lightning; Anissa Pierce/Thunder/Black Bird; and Jennifer Pierce/Lightning, this project examines the ways in which the show relies on the superhero semantics and mediates Black Christianity to negotiate Black political thought and respond to contemporary racial politics in the US. More precisely, it focuses on Jefferson's representation as an actor of Black respectability politics; Anissa's positioning as a radical activist and superhero often in conflict with the politics of respectability; and finally, Jennifer's political reawakening at a moment when the "postracial" myth is prevalent in the US. I'm grateful for the support of many people throughout my research and writing process. Thank you to my supervisor Dr. Benjamin Woo for putting up with messy drafts and incoherent thoughts, and for the constant encouragement and support throughout. Thank you to Dr. Hannah Dick
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".