by Cord J. Whitaker

This post contains spoilers for Black Panther.

 

I left Black Panther with a smile on my face and thinking one very comforting thought: black people will rule the world—and soon.

It’s not that Wakanda exists, nor that vibranium exists, nor even that white people should get their comeuppance. Everybody is human—with all the individual rights and respect that ought to come with. No. Instead, it is that the hey-day of the isolated and competitive nation-state are coming to an end. The political and economic dominance of Europeans and their American, Australian, and other descendants is a direct effect of the rise of the modern European nation-state at the end of the Middle Ages and in early modernity. It is the effect of colonialism and empire-building.

Globalization threatens the imperialist paradigm and its traditional northern and western centers of power. It doesn’t take the arrival of nostalgic and conservative America-first policies to see the threat, but it does make the threat (and the threatened) even more visible.

That’s Black Panther’s brilliance. When the comic series was started in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Wakanda’s isolationism and hiddenness was the conceit by which the central African nation had never fallen to European imperial rule. In the 60s, African nations were still gaining their independence. Between 1960 and 1970, 36 African nations gained independence from European powers. A number of successful independence campaigns preceded in the 40s and 50s as well, and more followed through the 70s and into the 80s. But the new film, directed by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, doesn’t leave Wakanda’s isolationism there.

In Black Panther, King T’Challa, played brilliantly by Chadwick Boseman, has a hard choice: he can continue to lead an Afro-futurist paradise that hides its glories from the world (with the illusion-making help of its vibranium-driven tech) or he can break with tradition by revealing the nation’s knowledge and resources in order to improve the world. Isolationism has kept Wakanda safe and allowed it to prosper, but the world finds its way in anyhow.

Events won’t leave Wakanda alone. Everett Frost (Martin Freeman) a white CIA agent whom T’Challa has become friendly—or at least, friendly enough—with is shot in the spine during the escape of Wakanda’s vibranium-stealing mortal enemy Ulysses Klaue. T’Challa must decide whether to let him die or transport him back to Wakanda where advanced medical tech can save his life. T’Challa chooses generosity.

In fact, Frost’s healing produces one of the film’s best lines: when he rises from his sickbed and begins to wander around the lab where he has been healed, he approaches the desk of his healer. Princess Shuri, played by Letitia Wright (known for her role in Black Mirror), doesn’t notice him at first. But when she does, she warns him—confidently, powerfully, and hilariously—“Don’t scare me like that, Colonizer.” (At this point, I turned to the longtime friend I came to the movie with—a white man with critical race studies training—and I informed him that this is my new greeting of choice for him, too.)

But if Frost weren’t foreigner enough, Wakanda soon has to contend with another American. Or, more precisely, a Wakandan-American in Eric Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. Killmonger is the abandoned son of the wayward Wakandan prince N’jobu, who was killed for his globalist “crimes” by his own brother and T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka. Killmonger was left to be raised as a black American in poverty-stricken Oakland, California. Until adulthood, he believed Wakanda was only a myth. Now he knows it’s real, arrives with a vengeance, challenges T’Challa, and forcefully takes the mantle of king and Black Panther. He leaves T’Challa, our real Black Panther, for dead.

Killmonger’s brand of globalism is vexed. He aims to introduce the world to Wakanda’s tech by providing it to the oppressed black diaspora. Black people, Killmonger is certain, will indeed rule the world—and soon. They will flip the script and forcibly oppress the world’s white population. Growing up in Oaktown in the 90s was rough, and he will have his revenge.

Of course, Killmonger’s program requires forcing the people of Wakanda to go against everything they have ever known. He uses violence, threats, and other forms of tyranny. He takes advantage of and then tries to destroy the nation’s most sacred traditions. Traditional central African religion and rites of passage mean nothing to this literally African-American anti-hero.

Fortunately, our Marvel hero, his beloved and highly skilled spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), his top general Okoye (Danai Gurira), and Princess Shuri win the day. Killmonger’s way is not how black people will rule the world.

During one of the two bonus scenes that occur after the credits begin to roll, T’Challa addresses the United Nations. The scene is a corrective to the scene that introduces T’Challa to the Marvel Movie Universe in Captain America: Civil War when King T’Chaka is killed by a bomb while presenting at the U.N. During this new U.N. address, the sly yet benevolent gleam in Chadwick Boseman’s eye suggests that black people will soon rule the world nonetheless.

In true Wakandan fashion, this will be a rulership like the world has never seen. It will not be the isolationism of Wakanda’s past. It will not be the globalism of the other U.N. member nations. It is telling that during the bonus scene, a member-nation representative interrupts T’Challa to ask, “With all due respect, King T’Challa, what could a nation of farmers have to offer the world?” If any nation has the right to condescend to others, it will soon be revealed that it is Wakanda. But I came away with the sense that lording it over others is not what Wakandan leadership will look like.

Killmonger’s mistake was that he thought Wakandan power should look like the European imperialism of the past. After all, oppressing others by vibranium-tech in 2018 would be little different than showing up in the Americas with firearms in 1550. The point is made by the Black Panther soundtrack, which is a truly inspired hip-hop gem from Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, The Weeknd, and other artists. A lyric in “Bloody Waters,” its eighth track (from Ab-Soul, Anderson .Paak, and James Blake), sums it up well: “So what’s your game plan if you got one? You aiming at passengers with a shotgun? The aftermath is: you in the scope.” If violence is employed, then retribution is inevitable. This is what T’Challa and his compatriots know.

Wakanda offers the world a new way—and the seeds of the new world are in globalism: the free exchange of knowledge, open communication, trade, a shared economic system. Yet these are only the beginnings. What comes next? Only heaven, and Wakanda, knows. In a world whose nations are increasingly seeking to retreat into their colonialist dominance by bucking against globalization—with Brexit, Trump’s ‘America First’ policies, Marine Le Pen and the Front National, and now burgeoning nationalism in Italy—Black Panther encourages its viewer to delight in a leader like T’Challa.

In the way of Wakanda lies the future. That’s why I’m still smiling.

 

Cord J. Whitaker is founder and editor of What Is Racial Difference?, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Spoke, the blog of the Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley College, and one of the lead bloggers at In the Middle, a site for a progressive medieval studies.