the history of the African Americans

BLACK PANTHER

It’s a movie about what it means to be black in both America and Africa—and, more broadly, in the world. Rather than dodge complicated themes about race and identity, the film grapples head-on with the issues affecting modern-day black life. It is also incredibly entertaining, filled with timely comedy, sharply choreographed action and gorgeously lit people of all colors. Its themes challenge institutional bias, its characters take unsubtle digs at oppressors, and its narrative includes prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition. The fact that Black Panther is excellent only helps. That Black Panther signifies a threat to some is unsurprising. A fictional African King with the technological war power to destroy you—or, worse, the wealth to buy your land—may not please someone who just wants to consume the latest Marvel chapter without deeper political consideration. Black Panther is emblematic of the most productive responses to bigotry: rather than going for hearts and minds of racists, it celebrates what those who choose to prohibit equal representation and rights are ignoring, willfully or not. This is a film with brains, muscle and heart that moves, breathes and thinks like no other superhero movie before it. It is crafted with extreme care and deep respect for black history and heritage. 

There is a fundamental dissonance in the term “African-American,” two feuding ancestries conjoined by a hyphen. That dissonance—a hyphen standing in for the brutal history that intervened between Africa and America—is the subject of “Black Panther.  The film is not about world domination by an alien invasion or a mad cabal of villains but about the implications of a version of Western domination that has been with us so long that it has become as ambient as the air. There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But “Black Panther” fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative. Black Panther comes at an incredibly volatile time in American history with regards to race relations. Between accusations of police brutality, disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, and even lack of representation within American cultural institutions, bringing a black superhero to the big screen properly represents a major moment for the black community.