There has been a lot of debate about Hollywood’s 2018 blockbuster Black Panther, but here is my two cents: There is no question in my mind that Killmonger is the real hero and that T’Challa is the villain — and I strongly suspect that the CIA was involved in the production of this movie.
Let me explain. (SPOILER ALERT)
T’Challa, the protagonist and putative hero, is a reactionary monarch who is only in power because he was born as a member of the ruling class. In fact, he is a rather incompetent and unprepared leader. Politically, he expressly opposes supporting national liberation movements throughout the world and solely believes in running his nation as an isolated autarky.
Killmonger, the “villain,” is a revolutionary who grew up in poverty in Oakland and wants to use Wakanda’s enormous wealth to support national liberation movements and arm the oppressed in their struggles against their colonialist, white supremacist, and capitalist oppressors.
Killmonger takes power legitimately and rightfully, by defeating T’Challa in a completely fair ritual battle that the latter consented to, and then immediately begins waging a revolution. Killmonger moves toward abolishing reactionary feudalism in Wakanda (he burns the heart-shaped herbs) and creates a kind of Comintern that will support liberation movements worldwide.
In response, the “hero” T’Challa literally teams up with a white CIA agent (YES, A WHITE CIA AGENT) to launch a military coup against the revolutionary Black nationalist who legitimately and rightfully took power from him.
The white CIA agent proceeds to shoot down all of the planes that were shipping advanced weapons to oppressed peoples across the globe. And T’Challa then murders the Black revolutionary leader who believes in supporting global anti-imperialist struggles.
And the moral and political takeway is that T’Challa has learned his lesson, and will become a respected and responsible international leader — by incorporating Wakanda into the international capitalist-imperialist system.
Instead of helping to fight imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, T’Challa pledges at the United Nations (an imperialist institution with its origins in the explicitly colonial and white supremacist League of Nations) that he will use these global imperialist institutions and the capitalist market to help other colonized nations “develop,” doubtless on neoliberal models.
The revolutionary Killmonger pledged solidarity and a new system in which the oppressed become the rulers; the reactionary monarch T’Challa pledges charity and reform.
In the final scene, when T’Challa reveals his grand plans to create a community center in Oakland, I almost thought it was satire for a moment. This is what the movie would have us believe is the preferable alternative to armed resistance.
In fact, Killmonger quite obviously seems to be based on Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton (it is noteworthy that, in the comics, Killmonger is supposed to be from Harlem, whereas the movie version makes him from Oakland). The film even clearly models the Wakandan throne after the wicker chair Newton famously posed in with a spear (and a gun).
This is not to endorse everything Killmonger did. He is clearly very brutal and quite authoritarian. But many revolutionaries throughout history have been equally ruthless — including historical revolutionary figures who have today even been accepted into the mainstream. Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to name just one example, oversaw some pretty grotesque actions that I would certainly not defend, but also indisputably helped emancipate millions of people from slavery and colonialism. The Allied Powers likewise committed some absolutely heinous war crimes in World War II (the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firebombing of Dresden loom large), but they crushed genocidal fascist regimes.
It is grotesque and mind-blowingly racist that Marvel and Hollywood spent months selling this movie as pro-Black, when in reality it portrayed Black liberation as evil and villainous.
It is revolting and vomit-inducing that movie studios and the “entertainment industry” are exploiting popular culture to such a degree to depict a pro-imperialist film as the peak of social progress. But at the end of the day Hollywood is only interested in representation, not liberation.
Unfortunately none of this is surprising, considering Hollywood is and has always been a fundamentally capitalist and racist institution. Black Panther is not the exception; it is the norm.
