Black Panther Stretches the White Imagination
When I saw Marvel’s official Black Panther trailer first time during the 2016 Super Bowl (side note: I boycotted last season) I was HYPED! I remember thinking to myself, “Ooooh, people ain’t gonna know how to act with this one.” Out of the gate, the high expectations were there. I was on travel so I didn’t get a chance to view the film for the first time until over a week after it premiered in the States. Obviously, it did not disappoint. It lived up to its hype! Unpacking all the takeaways and themes of this movie is the stuff of collegiate course curriculums, doctoral dissertations, and the best of the best think pieces from the likes of literary giants like Chimamanda or Ta-Nehisi (the latter actually penned his own Black Panther series).
This film is disrupting and expanding people’s thoughts, perceptions, and ideas about both the Continent and the Diaspora. I’d love to spend hours, days, weeks, and months cycling through all the conversations it has sparked. But there’s just too much terrain to cover. Instead, I’ll focus on the recurring theme that leaped from the screen for ME. That is the white imagination.
Ok, so first things first. White supremacist ideology is preeminent in our society and, arguably, the world. The pervasiveness of white supremacy has (incorrectly) taught us that whiteness and white people are superior to people of color, that the purpose of society’s institutions is to advance whiteness, and that people of color are inherently unworthy of the advancements that white people enjoy. This is the backdrop upon which we all live. It seeps into your subconscious, at times involuntarily, and informs your worldview.
In her book, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, bell hooks purports that white imagination envisions black people as inferior, subhuman, unintelligent, troublemakers to be used solely as a means to advance the agenda of the dominant race. History repeatedly offers us evidence of the truth of hooks’ claims, running the gamut from the most macro to the most micro of examples.
The horror of slavery (macro) advanced the economies of multiple White nations across the globe — the US, France, England, The Netherlands and Spain. Real-life black woman superhero, Henrietta Lacks (micro), a dying cancer patient whose biological property was taken from her without consent, produced the first immortal HeLa cell line revolutionizing modern medicine. For generations, black people have lived with the ramifications of white supremacy in almost every way. The highly-documented effects of slavery’s damaging legacy is vast and still lingers 150+ years later. The Lacks family is still fighting to receive acknowledgement and compensation for the invaluable contribution that their mother gave to the medical world.
These examples reveal that before racial oppression even manifests, it is contrived within the white imagination and propagated by the system of white supremacy. This manifestation is what gave birth to the centuries long oppression of black bodies. But this film. THIS FILM flips that fantasy on its head! It recreates a black existence that has not been infiltrated by white supremacy — real or imagined.
As the antagonist Ulysses Klaue reveals during his interrogation, “Explorers have searched for it, called it El Dorado. They looked for it in South America, but it was in Africa the whole time.” Basically, Wakanda is the personification of the golden city. It is the most technologically advanced society on the planet and the literal embodiment of Lupe Fiasco’s song All Black Everything. Wakanda has never been tarnished by the stain of colonization. It exists on a plane that is inaccessible to the white imagination.
In this world, excellence is commonplace. King T’Challa, the Black Panther himself, redefines how we visualize leadership relative to the black man. In our reality, world leaders rarely come with melanin (the few examples are often vilified). But in Wakanda, leadership is beloved and black! T’Challa’s sister, Princess Shuri, is a genius engineer extraordinaire. Her mind can easily rival that of brilliant Tony Stark, the Iron Man. She is the brains behind the entire operation and she epitomizes the Black Girl Magic that is often undercut and unappreciated in the real world.
My personal history as a black man born out of the “lost lineage” of the Transatlantic Slave Trade allows me to understand all too well that feeling of uncontrollable rage that anchored villain, Erick Killmonger’s motives. My Haitian American heritage makes it easy for me to conceptualize a world where black people live and rule independently. My work on the Continent over the past several years has given me incredible insight into the rich beauty of Africa that is often ignored on the world stage.
For all these reasons and more, Black Panther struck the deepest of chords within me. Wakanda shows us what black people could be if we were truly unbridled (#NoEntry). It is proof positive that in our mind’s eye, we are built for greatness. Unlike the white imagination, I can witness and experience black greatness and not be ignorant about it, perturbed by it, or disgusted from it. If given the opportunity, we can achieve the impossible! I’ve seen pockets of Wakanda stateside in my family and friends. I’ve seen Wakanda in Haiti. I’ve seen it in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ghana. Wherever black people are allowed to live out their full potential, you can find Wakanda.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a black country is in a unique position to DECIDE to provide unprecedented aid to white countries. Just the teasing of this concept in a work of fiction has the power to expose the lie that is the white imagination and the system of white supremacy. In our world, we’ve seen this play out in the same way when Haiti provided aid to North America fighting alongside colonial troops against the British in 1779 during the Revolutionary War. But the acknowledgement of this aid cannot even be found in our standard history books!
At the end of the movie, King T’Challa brings Shuri along with him to spearhead a new science initiative in the urban Oakland neighborhood their cousin Killmonger grew up in. In a profound exchange, you see a young black boy ask King T’Challa, a black man, if he is the owner of the futuristic aircraft that has just interrupted his basketball game. When T’Challa confirms that he is, in that moment, you can almost see the boy’s mind shift. This single interaction has created a space for him to now imagine the unimaginable. That shift is what is worth fighting for. That is what, when cultivated, will grow to encompass the potential greatness of all people.
My hope is that life will imitate art giving way to a new system that envisions the greatness of all people of color, allowing us all to imagine the unimaginable. May we continue to speak truth to power until we see Wakanda everywhere. #WakandaForever.
-Shout out to Jess for helping me make this piece better! Dis is Wakanda!
