One angle of appreciating Black Panther was its take on abundance and scarcity, and its criticism of "zero-sum games." Wakanda was great for most people due to its post-scarcity situation, but, sounding like the Boddhisatva who could not enjoy Nirvana unless he reincarnated to bring other people to enlightenment, Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) said she could not enjoy Wakanda knowing that its happy, peaceful security was happening at the expense of her neighbors in Africa going unprotected.
Scarcity in the midst of abundance should ring all sorts of alarm bells. It is an important depiction of how structural violence works: how many lives end in a premature state, or endure extra-suffering, as the cost of comfortable middle-class living? In other words, we gain success as a nation on whose backs, at whose expense?
Not that Wakanda actively exploited anyone, but then again, most middle-class families are not either; it is their passivity in the name of comfort and security which keeps them in their bubble of criminal inaction. Chadwick Boseman, who plays King T'Challa, himself said his character represents "the enemy I’ve always known. It’s power. It’s having privilege.” He characterizes T’Challa as “born with a vibranium spoon in my mouth.”
But he was always horrified by the way his father treated his uncle and Kilmonger, and as a white person I could relate to this from my experience of going from "white guilt" for my ancestors to "white responsibility" of being more like Nakia - he owns up to his responsibility. He lets Kilmonger challenge him, even when others tried to stop it. And since the beginning, T'Challa leaned more toward the views of Nakia, toward "I don't have to feel like I'm *losing* by giving up my comfort to fight for your security." He transcended the zero-sum game. Whereas people tried to convince T'Challa "we don't want refugees bringing their problems with them." This is almost an exact quote of Donald Trump saying "When Mexico sends its people...they're bringing their problems with them" (crime) and the logic of his Syrian refugee ban. Elsewhere, people in Wakanda argued that they could not both protect Wakanda's security and share its resources with Black peoples. It had to be *either* one *or* the other.
Jessica Benjamin is a therapist I learned about last semester who writes about the importance of not getting locked into zero-sum games, whether in family or romantic relationships on the one hand, or on the level of social groups on the other (she focuses on Israel and Palestine). Specifically, she looks at the false scarcity zero-sum game of "not all can be saved," which also speaks to the tribalistic ethno-nationalism in America whereby we tell Mexicans and Muslim refugees that "We need to take care of our own Veterans and homeless. We can't take you." This is a lie and an excuse to keep America white. The elite doesn't give a damn about American veterans, homeless people, and never will; and Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bernie, no one is going to save the day. It is going to take people power, the death of nihilism and fatalism, and white non-elites are going to *have to* find solidarity with people of color, especially the ghetto dwellers and refugees and undocumented peoples currently whites are taught to see as a "drain on the system," and *show up* for them, because we're all in this together.
By the end of the film, we see Wakanda positioning itself in a way that transcends the "either/or" binary, a binary Jessica Benjamin calls the "complementarity" relationship where neither side can recognize each other's concerns as valid. But how far will this go? Will Wakandans really see past their own projections towards the other's full humanity, so that Kilmonger and his father are released from their isolation in the realm of the ancestors?
By the end of the film, we see Wakanda positioning itself in a way that transcends the "either/or" binary, a binary Jessica Benjamin calls the "complementarity" relationship where neither side can recognize each other's concerns as valid. But how far will this go? Will Wakandans really see past their own projections towards the other's full humanity, so that Kilmonger and his father are released from their isolation in the realm of the ancestors?
Critiques
My critiques of the film are best articulated in an article I will quote from, concerning the pathologizing of Kilmonger. They did not have to make him cold-blooded. The actual Black Panthers in Oakland California *combined* the desire for armed revolution of *all* oppressed peoples (including white people) with doing free community survival programs. They had Kilmonger's aims with T'Challa's methods but also Kilmonger's methods as a card on the table (minus the total slaughter, more like the American Revolution) - and though one of its leaders ended up a raging bully (his time in jail may have made him into a bully), there is also the example of Malcolm X (see about his third-world internationalism) who kept this balance of revolutionary-with-a-moral center. Some context: you must know there was a post-WW2 "first world" (USA/Western Europe), "second world" (USSR) split, where each "world" tried to be leaders of the world; they were challenged by the NAM (non-aligned movement) of the "third world". Read The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad for a look at this.
Trope Number One: Lacking Internationalist View
Trope Number One: Lacking Internationalist View
"The animating principle of the Nonaligned Movement, a struggle for Third World autonomy and power endorsed by the “Afro-Asian” conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. The spiritual heirs of Bandung, including Malcolm X, rejected the United States’s self-proclaimed status as “leader of the free world.” They viewed the US as a violent empire and they insisted that “the darker nations” must acquire the power—military and otherwise—to resist American aggression. Killmonger, it seems, is a fictional grandson of Bandung, though he has clearly failed to digest the movement’s emphasis on peace and human rights as alternatives to expansionism. However, the real American power structure still fears any global alliance that might present an ideological counterforce to US hegemony. So Killmonger is depicted as deranged and his plot to arm people is cast as a bitter crusade for vengeance rather than as a rational response to the horrors of white supremacy and imperialism. In this manner, defenders of empire are able to distort the historical project of the Third World left while equating with terrorism any vision of globalization not managed by US capitalism and its allies.
Trope Number Two: African American Pathology
"Portraying Killmonger as demented does not merely smear radicalism. It also recycles racist themes of black corruption and immorality. Ironically, this aspect of Black Panther has been largely ignored amid delight over the film’s more auspicious representations of blackness. In truth, though, the flattering depictions are uneven. Black Panther sets African virtue against African-American vice.
"The juxtaposition is pernicious. For assertions of black degeneracy often accompany narratives of cultural decline, including the idea that the traumas of slavery or urban life permanently damaged African Americans. As the historian Daryl Scott has shown, such myths have long generated contempt and pity for black America. What they have never done is honor the resilience that enabled black folk to survive the nightmares of the New World.
"Cloistered and provincial, Wakanda lacks a revolutionary heritage that might help shape its social institutions or foreign relations. Oakland, on the other hand, possesses a legacy of radical struggle enriched by the irrepressible spirit of African Americans." Professor Russell Rickford
