Reform it? Or shut it down?
A look at the movies The Girl With All the Gifts and The Black Panther
“I’m sorry, sergeant. I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s going to be all right. It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore.”
I’ve been reading a lot about speculative realism and Afrofuturism lately. The more I read, the more I realize it will be a long time before I feel confident in either area… but the ideas are exciting to me.
Afrofuturism is a genre that makes the bold statement that people of color will exist in the future (more on why it’s a bold statement to come). Afrofuturism defies white male norms of the present and uses the imagination as a tool of resistance. What would happen with different norms?
Speculative realism is a genre pioneered by young authors who recognize that existing genres that maintain the status quo are inadequate vehicles to discuss the racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia inherent in present day structures. Therefore, they write worlds outside these structures and imagine what the future might be.
I’m sure many people are invested in the future. We wonder about it. We prepare for it. Maybe we’re excited or maybe we’re afraid. In my personal life, all of the above are true. As a teacher, however, I feel a sort of responsibility for shaping it. Every day in my classroom, I’m faced with the future. I go to work and watch beautiful young people discovering who they are, growing and thinking. I get a glimpse of tomorrow today.
In another world maybe…
I teach in a Title I school in Hammond, IN. It’s all the cliches. My students are working class, mostly Black and Latino youth — and they’re wonderful people — but struggle academically. I leave work everyday learning more than I teach, and feeling frustrated that every day I’m letting these kids down.
Oddly enough, this is what led me to read more about speculative realism and Afro-futurism. This system ain’t cuttin’ it for my kiddos, and some part of me believes that if we can imagine one that can, we have a better chance of making it happen.
The need for Afro-futurism…
Afro-futurism is a genre that assumes that Black people will be around in the future, which requires that the past and the present be reimagined.
It was shocking when I first considered this. Can we really be en route to a world where people of color, in particular Black people, are extinct?
It’s pretty sad that we have to work really hard to imagine Black people in the future. But let’s look at the facts…
The systematic brutalization and murder of Black people in this country (and around the world) has a long history. The institution of slavery necessitated the creation of a culture and an academy that perfected and maintained racism.
After “emancipation”, black codes laid the groundwork for mass incarceration today… and let’s not forget the Jim Crow laws.
Today, black men are 21 times more likely to killed by cops than their white counterparts.
Black people in the U.S. are incarcerated at six times the rates of White Americans.
It isn’t just the racist criminal justice system that superoppresses the Black working class. A recent article in The Guardian titled “Poverty leads to death for more black Americans than whites” links mass unemployment, lack of educational opportunity, and the resulting disproportionate poverty to chronic health diseases like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. The Washington Post cites not only poverty, but also racism, as a cause of Alzheimer’s disease. The Chicago Tribune recently published an article outlining the study by University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute revealing the heartbreaking statistic that nearly half of young Black men in Chicago are neither employed nor in school. Given education statistics, this isn’t surprising.
When Michelle Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow, she sparked a nation-wide debate about the school to prison pipeline.
Some disturbing facts:
That may not be stating it strongly enough, so let’s look at some examples. In Los Angeles, only 3% of students who were given out of school suspensions were White. The remainder were Black and Latino students. That’s not the worst case, though. In a St. Louis school district, 100% of all students who were given more than one out-of-school suspension, expelled, or referred to law enforcement were black.
Conveniently, those statistics never made news with the Ferguson (part of the greater St. Louis metropolitan) rebellions. It’s no wonder people were ready to burn it down…
Which brings me back to Black Panther and The Girl With All the Gifts…
Two important differences in the movies are striking to me.
The first is that one was a blockbuster, and the other (while critically acclaimed in other countries) was only available in limited release in the United States.
The other glaring difference is the message each movie makes at the end…
The Girl With All the Gifts was adapted from a novel by the same name. In the both the movie and the novel, Melanie (and countless others) is infected with a mysterious virus that somehow converts humans into zombie-like creatures called hungries. The creatures lose all ability to think and reason, and behave like animals hunting human flesh. Melanie and some other children are somehow resistant to parts of the strain, and they are able to function and learn very much like normal children. Uninfected humans have developed a lotion that blocks the human scent, and so they are able to interact with these infected, but resistant, children. The reason, of course, is not to care for them, but to use them to find the cure.
The children are used as lab rats, given only the necessities for survival, and basically viewed as monsters. Melanie, the main character, wins the heart of the reader/viewer right away. She’s smart, funny and caring — influenced, no doubt, by her favorite teacher who struggles to maintain at least some humanity in the children. She reads them stories, treats them with kindness, and tries her best to deliver a quality education. In the book, the child is White and the teacher is Black. In the movie, however it is reversed… which I think is brilliant. Here’s why:
The endings…
****Spoiler alert****
After the typical adventure of a post apocalyptic zombie movie, Melanie (played by the incredibly talented Sennia Nanua) makes a huge decision. Rather than continue the quest to maintain human life as it has been (that oppresses her and treats her as an animal), she takes power.
She sets fire to a cluster of seed pods carrying the deadly fungus, which will essentially infect the remainder of the population. Ironically, this doesn’t signal the end of the world- it’s the birth of something new.
With a compassion that is undeserved, Melanie turns to a white male soldier who is dying and says, “I’m sorry, sergeant. I’m so sorry. It’s going to be all right. It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore.”
Where do we get to see that? A Black girl setting fire and ending a system of oppression… and it being HOPEFUL!!!! State power in the hands of a young girl of color…
She does save the teacher, though.
Why?
Because she recognizes that she and the other children like her are the beginnings of a new world, and now that they have state power, they finally have the chance at the education they deserve.
Let’s think about the race of the characters here again…
In the book’s telling, we have a Black teacher that was, in fact, rescued from the spores but is beholden to live in confinement and teach a White little girl.
Hmmm… oh the implications!!!
Switching that dynamic is HUGE! A young Black girl gets to be the hero and leader of a world we’ve yet to imagine. And she makes quality education the bedrock.
Compare this to the end of Black Panther (which I wrote about in another too-long article linked to the title)
If you haven’t seen the film and you’re looking for the tweet-style summary here it goes: Killmonger, the villain, wants to use Wakanda’s weapons to arm the Black working class to stage a revolution. The Black Panther, King T’Challa, has to reconcile the very powerful statements made by Killmonger with Wakanda’s isolationist policies. It seems T’Challa does see the validity, but doesn’t see revolution as the answer.
In the end of Black Panther, given the chance to, they don’t burn it (capitalism) down. Instead, they bolster it.
The film is resolved by:
2) Sharing Wakana’s technology with the UN (which surely will lead to imperialist wars, the creation of more weapons… so forth and so on)
and
- The creation of a high tech community center in Oakland, California.
I want to focus for a second on that one. I’m skeptical of any push of one subject. I think the engineers of education and racism are one and the same and I don’t think they’ll ever willingly provide our students with the tools to take them down.
In the Wakanda scenario, I imagine the Wakanda outreach program preparing students of color to build weapons with Wakandan technology that will be used to oppress people of color around the world.
In the U.S., I see the same. Some may console themselves believing at least it provides a living wage jobs for our students, but the word on that is … not so much.
An Article from the Atlantic titled “Will the Push for Coding Lead to ‘Technical Ghettos’?: The emphasis on knowing Java and JavaScript could put students of color on the bottom rung of the tech workforce” warns that this “get a good job” mindset actually does the opposite. As high school and middle school students become involved in STEM programs, most often in the form of coding, they are being groomed to work as service techs and helpdesk agents.(read Geek Squad). There’s nothing wrong with these jobs, but they’re the bottom rung of science and math careers.
The emphasis on programming also sacrifices problem solving skills and critical & creative thinking, which are absolutely necessary to imagine a world where Black workers aren’t at the bottom.
An Afro Futuristic/Speculative Realist future?
So if I make the leap of faith that the slow not so subtle genocide of Blacks fails, and that the Black people of the world will survive and thrive, what world do I have to imagine NOW in order to make that happen?
Do I take Door A- tear it down and start over?
Or Door B- trust that this time, with a boss that looks like my students, the system will be a bit kinder, and maybe they have half a chance?
Or have we been through that door before?
