We Were All Wakandan: A Night at the Apollo
In the first installment of The Comments newsletter, I talk about attending a live conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates, Lupita Nyong’o, and Chadwick Boseman at the Apollo. Subscribe here.
Last week I wrote about Black Panther’s portrayal of the black American experience. Read it here.
There’s a weird, contradictory sensation that comes with feeling understood. It’s sort of like a chill, but it’s warm. There’s a heaviness, but it’s comfortable — like a bear hug. It makes you want to cheer. It makes you want to cry. That feeling overwhelmed me last week when I attended a live discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Black Panther co-stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o.
The event was at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and the atmosphere was celebratory. After a few rounds of applause in as many minutes, Coates mentioned that he’d never participated in an event with such an enthusiastic audience. Comprised mostly of members of the African diaspora (i.e. black people), the audience erupted in cheers with Nyong’o’s mentions of Nigeria, Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, the U.S., and more. In that moment, we were diverse within our collective blackness rather than “diverse” because of our individual blacknesses.
To come into belonging, you first have to be an outsider, and appreciate being understood, you have to know what it means to be misunderstood.
The feeling in that room was the same one I had watching Black Panther and, early last year, while watching (the Academy Award-winning!) Get Out. The people on stage and on screen were talking about and experiencing things I inherently understood — not because I learned them in order to assimilate into white society, but because they were things I experienced myself. I was finally in a room in which everyone — from the theater employees to the audience to the movie stars — spoke the same language.
The most powerful moment of the night was during the Q&A session when Coates read a question from a 7-year-old boy. Before Coates could finish the question, the boy — wearing a Black Panther costume, mask in hand — was lifted onto the stage. Amid uproarious applause, Boseman walked over to the boy and knelt to sign his memorabilia, then spent a couple minutes chatting with him.
Looking back at that moment, I get why the feeling of being understood — of belonging — is so bittersweet. To come into belonging, you first have to be an outsider, and appreciate being understood, you have to know what it means to be misunderstood. The audience’s raucous enthusiasm that night felt borne of gratitude and a sort of desperation: the recognition that this newfound sense of belonging could just as soon be taken away.
So when a little black boy in a superhero costume met a black man who became a real-life superhero, our hearts burst with hope that this moment wasn’t an anomaly, and that the little boy would never know what it means to be on the margins, to be misunderstood. And at least for that night, he was the center of the universe.
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