‘Black Panther’ And The Question of Black Bureaucracy
Do the characterization of blacks, in Black Panther, re-enforce the same colonial stereotypes it tries to get away from? (This critique is not politically correct; I apologize up front.) I think so. Yes, this is a strange interpretation of a movie which uses plot-devices common to almost every action-adventure story. It was written by a black man and almost everyone I know, who saw it, loved it.
Am I nitpicking? Did Wonder Woman, which also depicts women as warriors feed into the argument that women can’t do math?
I play pick-up basketball with a black guy in his 50s. One day he says, “I just saw the Jew’s wet-dream movie of all time — Inglorious Bastards” I found his joke about the movie’s subtext very funny. As a black man, he could make it.
Black Panther, to me, is a white supremacist’s wet-dream of a movie.
Wait. How can a black writer encode the assumption of white supremacy into his own movie? Well, that’s the insidious power of propaganda. Should blacks care what white supremacists think? No. But does Hollywood have a responsibility, nonetheless, to reign in their stock-in-trade prejudices?
The backdrop of Black Panther is colonialism. It imagines a world that might have been, if Africa wasn’t exploited. It gives voice to the black frustration at having been enslaved and later marginalized in America. It’s a feel-good movie.
Perhaps colonialism and other factors prevented blacks from keeping their historically well-governed societies alive. Have whatever effects colonialism had on Africa worn off? At what point do blacks in America or Africa claim independence from historical forces? Has that day come? Can Black Panther now enjoy the same freedoms as every other action-adventure movie?
I don’t believe so. And I believe Hollywood should be sensitive to the context of their narratives in the real world. Although I wasn’t as sensitive to a problem in Wonder Woman, I found one in Borat where a Jewish man, Sacha Baron Cohen, makes jokes that foment antisemitism by ridiculing those who aren’t Jewish.
In order to understand the context in which I’m looking at Black Panther, it helps to think about this question, what makes for a technologically advanced society? What would one expect to observe to believe Wakanda exists?
My reading of history is that since the dawn of mankind, no society has grown powerful enough to maintain a leisure class, with all the arts, humanities, technical progress, etc. without institutions and bureaucracies. In the East or West, spanning different races, one can observe the same institutions. They generally have powerful classes of people: soldiers, lawyers, scientists, administrators who dress alike, who don’t dress to express individualism.
Institutions that seem absent in the Wakanda world of Black Panther.
Instead, we observe a government run by atavistic bloodlines and clans. Leaders come from royalty, like Killmonger, who has not a single redeeming good quality. For starters, he is a homicidal maniac who shoots his girlfriend. Killmonger would not be an issue if he was Chinese say, and people could believe he is the exception in the history of Chinese rule.
When T’Challa visits the U.N. he is wearing a black business suit. So it’s not as if the creators of Black Panther are totally oblivious to the unwritten rules of powerful governments (how their bureaucracies dress) throughout history.
The story of Black Panther, knowingly or not, furthers the argument that blacks haven’t developed the institutions strong enough to replace Kings battling to the death for leadership. Where the good of the people isn’t thrown out the window just because some psychopath with bloodline to the King shows up wanting the throne.
That said, government with strong bureaucracies are not without their flaws. Such governments fought two world wars killing over 50 million people, which ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on 200,000 civilians. Today, we have huge institutions in the U.S. which assassinate foreigners (terrorists) in foreign lands (theoretically acts of war). China tracks all its citizens through cameras, facial recognition and huge databases. Maybe Wakanda isn’t so bad after all.
Nonetheless, I cringed watching the final battle scene with individual black-on-black violence trying to protect the rule of a murdering sociopath while a white man uses their modern aircraft to shoot down blacks who are just obeying orders.
Black Panther wants it both ways. It wants to hold onto its place as the origin of the species, as super warriors (as individuals), as most colorfully dressed people while also ignoring the fact that the most powerful nations on Earth have soldiers (not warriors) in uniform and ruling classes that dress the same and operate as teams.
It’s just a movie. I can see how I sound ridiculous, in my expectation that an action-adventure movie should depict a complex government. Again, the question is how much innocence can we grant a movie when subtle forms of racism persist which the movie could have easily been fixed.
That is, the story of Black Panther could have shown a stronger government blocking the takeover by Killmonger. It’s not as if the idea didn’t exist; it did in one of the female warriors. But she was alone.
My curiosity is this, do all blacks agree with the movie that Wakanda would be the perfect black nation? Today’s current pressure to avoid racist dialogue prevents not only whites from speaking freely. It silences blacks. In the end, my argument is that the issue doesn’t get settled and remains in the shadows potentially harming the advancement of educated blacks and black businesses as they compete for jobs or contracts.
Let me point out a show where the creators are very sensitive to these issues — Breaking Bad.
In Breaking Bad the hero is a white, well-educated science teacher who once worked in big business. When he starts making meth he uses his “institutional” knowledge to create better meth than the other undisciplined individuals.
Most drama has some element of the hero, up against an institution-gone-evil. One can read Breaking Bad in that way too, where society didn’t provide a way for Walter White to support his family so he was forced into a life of crime. That’s also a storyline most blacks can relate to. Indeed, if Walter White had been played by a black man I don’t believe the dialogue would have been changed.
As Walter become more successful, he wants people to call him Heisenberg, which connotes German institutional discipline. When the creators wanted to put Walter up against the the greatest challenge they could have easily picked an Asian. Or a white, or Russian or some Baltic European. But no.
Enter Gus Fring, the most disciplined, intelligent, consensus building character in all of Breaking Bad. He is black. Indeed, in one of their first meetings Gus doesn’t want to work with Walter because he doesn’t trust him to play by the rules. How does Gus dress? Like a bureaucrat. Gus could have been played by an uber WASP white actor and not a single line of his dialogue would have been changed.
The-good-of-society values are not, in themselves, racial. It is one reason why Western nations have succeeded. Their military and governments are not constructed on race, but ideals. Black or white, if you believe in these principles, you can join the military and everyone is subject to the same pay-scale. These are values worth struggling for. These are the values I believe a real Wakanda would have. Is there a reason why they could not have been part of the movie?
Why does Black Panther envision blacks in a society the colonists have depicted in their non-black literature for hundreds of years. What about Africa today? Black Panther portrays the saddest vision I can imagine of such a future, where government is run by bloodline and people ape-grunt to others who simply speak their mind.
If there is a Black Panther II, I hope the filmmakers address what I believe is a flaw in their first film. Africa deserves better.
