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Why ‘Black Panther’ Is a Defining Moment for Black America
The Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous
ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind
us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community
event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see
it. There are local film festivals, indie film festivals, erotic film
festivals, congressional town halls, political fund-raisers. After Hurricane
Katrina, the lobby served as a drop-off for donations. We run into friends
and classmates there. On weekends we meet at the farmers’ market across the
street for coffee.
The last momentous community event I experienced at the Grand Lake was a
weeknight viewing of “Fruitvale Station,” the 2013 film directed by the
Bay Area native Ryan Coogler. It was about the real-life police shooting of
Oscar Grant, 22, right here in Oakland, where Grant’s killing landed less
like a news story and more like the death of a friend or a child. He had
worked at a popular grocery, gone to schools and summer camps with the
children of acquaintances. His death — he was shot by the transit police
while handcuffed, unarmed and face down on a train-station platform, early
in the morning of New Year’s Day 2009 — sparked intense grief, outrage and
sustained protest, years before Black Lives Matter took shape as a movement
. Coogler’s telling took us slowly through the minutiae of Grant’s last
day alive: We saw his family and child, his struggles at work, his
relationship to a gentrifying city, his attempts to make sense of a young
life that felt both aimless and daunting. But the moment I remember most
took place after the movie was over: A group of us, friends and strangers
alike and nearly all black, stood in the cool night under the marquee,
crying and holding one another. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know one
another. We knew enough.
On a misty morning this January, I found myself standing at that same spot,
having gotten out of my car to take a picture of the Grand Lake’s marquee.
The words “Black Panther” were on it, placed dead center. They were not in
normal-size letters; the theater was using the biggest ones it had. All the
other titles huddled together in another corner of the marquee. A month
away from its Feb. 16 opening, “Black Panther” was, already and by a wide
margin, the most important thing happening at the Grand Lake.
Marvel Comics’s Black Panther was originally conceived in 1966 by Stan Lee
and Jack Kirby, two Jewish New Yorkers, as a bid to offer black readers a
character to identify with. The titular hero, whose real name is T’Challa,
is heir apparent to the throne of Wakanda, a fictional African nation. The
tiny country has, for centuries, been in nearly sole possession of vibranium
, an alien element acquired from a fallen meteor. (Vibranium is powerful and
nearly indestructible; it’s in the special alloy Captain America’s shield
is made of.) Wakanda’s rulers have wisely kept their homeland and its
elemental riches hidden from the world, and in its isolation the nation has
grown wildly powerful and technologically advanced. Its secret, of course,
is inevitably discovered, and as the world’s evil powers plot to extract
the resources of yet another African nation, T’Challa’s father is cruelly
assassinated, forcing the end of Wakanda’s sequestration. The young king
will be forced to don the virtually indestructible vibranium Black Panther
suit and face a duplicitous world on behalf of his people.
This is the subject of Ryan Coogler’s third feature film — after “
Fruitvale Station” and “Creed” (2015) — and when glimpses of the work
first appeared last June, the response was frenzied. The trailer teaser —
not even the full trailer — racked up 89 million views in 24 hours. On Jan.
10, 2018, after tickets were made available for presale, Fandango’s
managing editor, Erik Davis, tweeted that the movie’s first 24 hours of
advance ticket sales exceeded those of any other movie from the Marvel
Cinematic Universe.
The black internet was, to put it mildly, exploding. Twitter reported that
“Black Panther” was one of the most tweeted-about films of 2017, despite
not even opening that year. There were plans for viewing parties, a fund-
raiser to arrange a private screening for the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem,
hashtags like #BlackPantherSoLit and #WelcomeToWakanda. When the date of the
premiere was announced, people began posting pictures of what might be
called African-Americana, a kitsch version of an older generation’s pride
touchstones — kente cloth du-rags, candy-colored nine-button suits, King
Jaffe Joffer from “Coming to America” with his lion-hide sash — alongside
captions like “This is how I’ma show up to the Black Panther premiere.”
Someone described how they’d feel approaching the box office by simply
posting a video of the Compton rapper Buddy Crip-walking in front of a
Moroccan hotel.
None of this is because “Black Panther” is the first major black superhero
movie. Far from it. In the mid-1990s, the Damon Wayans vehicle “Blankman”
and Robert Townsend’s “The Meteor Man” played black-superhero premises
for campy laughs. Superheroes are powerful and beloved, held in high esteem
by society at large; the idea that a normal black person could experience
such a thing in America was so far-fetched as to effectively constitute
gallows humor. “Blade,” released in 1998, featured Wesley Snipes as a
Marvel vampire hunter, and “Hancock” (2008) depicted Will Smith as a
slacker antihero, but in each case the actor’s blackness seemed somewhat
incidental.
“Black Panther,” by contrast, is steeped very specifically and
purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time
that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of
agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-
culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she
notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced
technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and
black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black
experience.
In a video posted to Twitter in December, which has since gone viral, three
young men are seen fawning over the “Black Panther” poster at a movie
theater. One jokingly embraces the poster while another asks, rhetorically:
“This is what white people get to feel all the time?” There is laughter
before someone says, as though delivering the punch line to the most painful
joke ever told: “I would love this country, too.”
Ryan Coogler saw his first Black Panther comic book as a child, at an
Oakland shop called Dr. Comics & Mr. Games, about a mile from the Grand Lake
Theater. When I sat down with him in early February, at the Montage Hotel
in Beverly Hills, I told him about the night I saw “Fruitvale Station,”
and he listened with his head down, slowly nodding. When he looked up at me,
he seemed to be blinking back tears of his own.
Coogler played football in high school, and between his fitness and his
humble listening poses — leaning forward, elbows propped on knees — he
reminds me of what might happen if a mild-mannered athlete accidentally
discovered a radioactive movie camera and was gifted with remarkable
artistic vision. He’s interested in questions of identity: What does it
mean to be a black person or an African person? “You know, you got to have
the race conversation,” he told me, describing how his parents prepared him
for the world. “And you can’t have that without having the slavery
conversation. And with the slavery conversation comes a question of, O.K.,
so what about before that? And then when you ask that question, they got to
tell you about a place that nine times out of 10 they’ve never been before.
So you end up hearing about Africa, but it’s a skewed version of it. It’s
not a tactile version.”
Around the time he was wrapping up “Creed,” Coogler made his first journey
to the continent, visiting Kenya, South Africa and the Kingdom of Lesotho,
a tiny nation in the center of the South African landmass. Tucked high amid
rough mountains, Lesotho was spared much of the colonization of its
neighbors, and Coogler based much of his concept of Wakanda on it. While he
was there, he told me, he was being shown around by an older woman who said
she’d been a lover of the South African pop star Brenda Fassie. Riding
along the hills with this woman, Coogler was told that they would need to
visit an even older woman in order to drop off some watermelon. During their
journey, they would stop occasionally to approach a shepherd and give him a
piece of watermelon; each time the shepherd would gingerly take the piece,
wrap it in cloth and tuck it away as though it were a religious totem. Time
passed. Another bit of travel, another shepherd, another gift of watermelon.
Eventually Coogler grew frustrated: “Why are we stopping so much?” he
asked. “Watermelon is sacred,” he was told. “It hydrates, it nourishes
and its seeds are used for offerings.” When they arrived at the old woman’
s home, it turned out that she was, in fact, a watermelon farmer, but her
crop had not yet ripened — she needed a delivery to help her last the next
few weeks.
When I was a kid, I refused to eat watermelon in front of white people. To
this day, the word itself makes me uncomfortable. Coogler told me that in
high school he and his black football teammates used to have the same rule:
Never eat watermelon in front of white teammates. Centuries of demonizing
and ridiculing blackness have, in effect, forced black people to abandon
what was once sacred. When we spoke of Africa and black Americans’ attempts
to reconnect with what we’re told is our lost home, I admitted that I
sometimes wondered if we could ever fully be part of what was left behind.
He dipped his head, fell briefly quiet and then looked back at me with a
solemn expression. “I think we can,” he said. “It’s no question. It’s
almost as if we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that we can’t have that
connection.”
“Black Panther” is a Hollywood movie, and Wakanda is a fictional nation.
But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also
function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store
some of our most deeply held aspirations. We have for centuries sought to
either find or create a promised land where we would be untroubled by the
criminal horrors of our American existence. From Paul Cuffee’s attempts in
1811 to repatriate blacks to Sierra Leone and Marcus Garvey’s back-to-
Africa Black Star shipping line to the Afrocentric movements of the ’60s
and ’70s, black people have populated the Africa of our imagination with
our most yearning attempts at self-realization. In my earliest memories, the
Africa of my family was a warm fever dream, seen on the record covers I
stared at alone, the sun setting over glowing, haloed Afros, the smell of
incense and oils at the homes of my father’s friends — a beauty so pure as
to make the world outside, one of car commercials and blond sitcom families
, feel empty and perverse in comparison. As I grew into adolescence, I began
to see these romantic visions as just another irrelevant habit of the older
folks, like a folk remedy or a warning to wear a jacket on a breezy day.
But by then my generation was building its own African dreamscape, populated
by KRS-One, Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers; we were
indoctrinating ourselves into a prideful militancy about our worth. By the
end of the century, “Black Star” was not just the name of Garvey’s
shipping line but also one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.
Never mind that most of us had never been to Africa. The point was not
verisimilitude or a precise accounting of Africa’s reality. It was the
envisioning of a free self. Nina Simone once described freedom as the
absence of fear, and as with all humans, the attempt of black Americans to
picture a homeland, whether real or mythical, was an attempt to picture a
place where there was no fear. This is why it doesn’t matter that Wakanda
was an idea from a comic book, created by two Jewish artists. No one knows
colonization better than the colonized, and black folks wasted no time in
recolonizing Wakanda. No genocide or takeover of land was required. Wakanda
is ours now. We do with it as we please.
Until recently, most popular speculation on what the future would be like
had been provided by white writers and futurists, like Isaac Asimov and Gene
Roddenberry. Not coincidentally, these futures tended to carry the power
dynamics of the present into perpetuity. Think of the original “Star Trek,
” with its peaceful, international crew, still under the charge of a white
man from Iowa. At the time, the character of Lieutenant Uhura, played by
Nichelle Nichols, was so vital for African-Americans — the black woman of
the future as an accomplished philologist — that, as Nichols told NPR, the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself persuaded her not to quit the show
after the first season. It was a symbol of great progress that she was
conceived as something more than a maid. But so much still stood in the way
of her being conceived as a captain.
The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is
meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t
just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use
technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we
will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in
which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else,
an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help
being part of this. “Wakanda itself is a dream state,” says the director
Ava DuVernay, “a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of
black people since we were brought here in chains.” She and Coogler have
spent the past few months working across the hall from each other in the
same editing facility, with him tending to “Black Panther” and her to her
much-anticipated film of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” At the
heart of Wakanda, she suggests, lie some of our most excruciating
existential questions: “What if they didn’t come?” she asked me. “And
what if they didn’t take us? What would that have been?”
Afrofuturism, from its earliest iterations, has been an attempt to imagine
an answer to these questions. The movement spans from free-jazz thinkers
like Sun Ra, who wrote of an African past filled with alien technology and
extraterrestrial beings, to the art of Krista Franklin and Ytasha Womack, to
the writers Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and Derrick Bell, to the music
of Jamila Woods and Janelle Monáe. Their work, says John I. Jennings — a
media and cultural studies professor at the University of California,
Riverside, and co-author of “Black Comix Returns” — is a way of upending
the system, “because it jumps past the victory. Afrofuturism is like, ‘We
already won.’ ” Comic books are uniquely suited to handling this
proposition. In them the laws of our familiar world are broken: Mild-
mannered students become godlike creatures, mutants walk among us and untold
power is, in an instant, granted to the most downtrodden. They offer an
escape from reality, and who might need to escape reality more than a people
kidnapped to a stolen land and treated as less-than-complete humans?
At the same time, it is notable that despite selling more than a million
books and being the first science-fiction author to win a MacArthur
fellowship, Octavia Butler, one of Afrofuturism’s most important voices,
never saw her work transferred to film, even as studios churned out
adaptations of lesser works on a monthly basis. Butler’s writing not only
featured African-Americans as protagonists; it specifically highlighted
African-American women. If projects by and about black men have a hard time
getting made, projects by and about black women have a nearly impossible one
. In March, Disney will release “A Wrinkle in Time,” featuring Storm Reid
and Oprah Winfrey in lead roles; the excitement around this female-led film
does not seem to compare, as of yet, with the explosion that came with “
Black Panther.” But by focusing on a black female hero — one who indeed
saves the universe — DuVernay is embodying the deepest and most powerful
essence of Afrofuturism: to imagine ourselves in places where we had not
been previously imagined.
Can films like these significantly change things for black people in America
? The expectations around “Black Panther” remind me of the way I heard the
elders in my family talking about the mini-series “Roots,” which aired on
ABC in 1977. A multigenerational drama based on the best-selling book in
which Alex Haley traced his own family history, “Roots” told the story of
an African slave kidnapped and brought to America, and traced his progeny
through over 100 years of American history. It was an attempt to claim for
us a home, because to be black in America is to be both with and without one
tantamount to hatred — but you are also told that you do not belong here,
that you are a burden, an animal, a slave. Haley, through research and
narrative and a fair bit of invention, was doing precisely what Afrofuturism
does: imagining our blackness as a thing with meaning and with lineage,
with value and place.
“The climate was very different in 1977,” the actor LeVar Burton recalled
to me recently. Burton was just 19 when he landed an audition, his first
ever, for the lead role of young Kunta Kinte in the mini-series. “We had
been through the civil rights movement, and there were visible changes as a
result, like there was no more Jim Crow,” he told me. “We felt that there
were advancements that had been made, so the conversation had really sort of
fallen off the table.” The series, he said, was poised to reignite that
conversation. “The story had never been told before from the point of view
of the Africans. America, both black and white, was getting an emotional
education about the costs of slavery to our common American psyche.”
To say that “Roots” held the attention of a nation for its eight-
consecutive-night run in January 1977 would be an understatement. Its final
episode was viewed by 51.1 percent of all American homes with televisions, a
kind of reach that seemed sure to bring about some change in opportunities,
some new standing in American culture. “The expectation,” Burton says, “
was that this was going to lead to all kinds of positive portrayals of black
people on the screen both big and small, and it just didn’t happen. It
didn’t go down that way, and it’s taken years.”
Here in Oakland, I am doing what it seems every other black person in the
country is doing: assembling my delegation to Wakanda. We bought tickets for
the opening as soon as they were available — the first time in my life I’
ve done that. Our contingent is made up of my 12-year-old daughter and her
friend; my 14-year-old son and his friend; one of my oldest confidants,
dating back to adolescence; and two of my closest current friends. Not
everyone knows everyone else. But we all know enough. Our group will be
eight black people strong.
Beyond the question of what the movie will bring to African-Americans sits
what might be a more important question: What will black people bring to “
Black Panther”? The film arrives as a corporate product, but we are using
it for our own purposes, posting with unbridled ardor about what we’re
going to wear to the opening night, announcing the depths of the squads we’
ll be rolling with, declaring that Feb. 16, 2018, will be “the Blackest Day
in History.”
This is all part of a tradition of unrestrained celebration and joy that we
have come to rely on for our spiritual survival. We know that there is no
end to the reminders that our lives, our hearts, our personhoods are
expendable. Yes, many nonblack people will say differently; they will
declare their love for us, they will post Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson
Mandela quotes one or two days a year. But the actions of our country and
its collective society, and our experiences within it, speak unquestionably
to the opposite. Love for black people isn’t just saying Oscar Grant should
not be dead. Love for black people is Oscar Grant not being dead in the
first place.
This is why we love ourselves in the loud and public way we do — because we
have to counter his death with the very same force with which such deaths
attack our souls. The writer and academic Eve L. Ewing told me a story about
her partner, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago: When it
is time for graduation, he makes the walk from his office to the
celebration site in his full regalia — the gown with velvet panels, full
bell sleeves and golden piping, the velvet tam with gold-strand bullion
tassel. And when he does it, every year, like clockwork, some older black
woman or man he doesn’t know will pull over, roll down their window, stop
him and say, with a slow head shake and a deep, wide smile, something like:
“I am just so proud of you!”
This is how we do with one another. We hold one another as a family because
we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and
failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for
good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold
on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan
warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and
indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future
ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.
RELATED COVERAGE
The Stars of ‘Black Panther’ Waited a Lifetime for This Moment Feb. 12,
2018
The Many Meanings of Black Panther’s Mask Feb. 13, 2018
Get the full New York Times experience
. | h**c
发帖数: 1979 | | W*****B
发帖数: 4796 | 3 不会有yellow panther， 拍也是拍yellow cow
：什么时候拍yellow panther?
：☆ 发自 iPhone 买买提 1.24.06
【在 h**c 的大作中提到】
: 什么时候拍yellow panther?
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