While I watched Season 2 of Marvel’s Netflix series, Luke Cage, I cringed, shook my head, and tried to find humor in the godawful Jamaican accents. After a while, I stopped laughing and began to feel disrespected. Like the show’s producers couldn’t be bothered to do their research? Or at the very least have a Jamaican speech coach on set? I’m Jamaican, 100 percent, and at times, I could not understand what some of the characters were saying, especially Sahr Ngaujah’s character, Anansi. But he’s just one of many, many.

Where is Paul Campbell when you need him? Or the countless other Jamaican actors here in New York and Jamaica?

And I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Social media is awash with criticism about the portrayal of the Jamaican culture, accent, and patwa (patois) in Luke Cage. Showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, tweeted rather dismissively, “I’d rather risk people being angry than not do it at all. Because people are now [Googling] The Maroons and Nanny and Marcus Garvey as we speak…sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good.”

Check out the article entitled “To the Producers of Marvel’s Luke Cage: Enough with the Ja’Faikans” by Andray Domise and Sharine Taylor on Vice. An excerpt:

“Patwa, a beautifully paradoxical language in its simple reductiveness and complex construction, is as much a part of Jamaican identity as our culture, dance, music, food, and all the other aspects that make us what we are. When it is repackaged, refined, and sanitized to be accepted by a broader audience, our culture becomes as unrecognizable as a gentrified Dole recipe for jerk chicken. The way to rectify this is simple: if you can, do, and if you can’t, don’t. It’s painful enough when our own parents try to strip us of our culture and language in order to survive in a world that doesn’t understand us. The last thing we need is the rest of pop culture affirming they were right to do so.”