-By Warner Todd Huston
I just saw Marvel’s Black Panther and after reading dozens of reviews touting it as one of the best Marvel movies ever, I have come to wonder this: Will liberals admit that this movie is a terribly racist film?
If you are planning on seeing this black-centric superhero movie, don’t wait. It really is a fun ride. It has heart, it has emotional weight, talk of loyalty, love, trust, and betrayal. It has lots of action and great special effects. It is also a super hero film that gets you to believe its mythos quite easily. It is a fun, engaging, worthwhile watch. I highly recommend it.
But, man oh man is it racist. It is the most racist film since 1915’s Birth of a Nation, a flick from the classic era that celebrated the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in a south ruined by a just concluded Civil War.
The film introduces us to the Black Panther storyline informing the viewer that the mythical African nation of Wakanda was built around a mountain filled with a mysterious and powerful metal that helped the five tribes unite into a technological giant that predated all of mankind’s other great nations. But because the early Wakandans understood that their “Vibranium” was so powerful, they realized that they had to hide their wealth and power from the world lest the knowledge of that power consume the world with avarice and war.
So, Wakanda invented stealth technology, developed great medical arts, and made powerful weapons long before the technology of the rest of the world even dreamed of such wonders. But they hid their nation behind a giant cloaking device deep in the heart of Africa. They eschewed contact with any other nation and kept their five tribes hidden from the world.
In the film we see Wakanda in all its hidden splendor with great skyscrapers, amazing magnetic railway systems, astonishing medical technology, and wondrous flying machines… and we see only black faces. No white, no Asians, not even any Africans from other regions of the so-called “Dark Continent.”
How racist, eh?
Indeed, the first time a white person enters the sacred inner sanctum — CIA agent Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) — Wakandans want to kill him just for being there. Later, when agent Ross is trying to tell another Wakandan about the dangers of their enemy, he is told not to speak in the presence of his black betters.
This is no film that you’ll see expressing the old “white man’s burden” storyline, for sure. (Though in the end it does just reassign that trope to Wakanda itself.)
While the film spends a lot of time building the Wakanda mythos (which it necessarily has to do, granted) it also treats the rest of the world filled with Negroes in a very superficial and stereotypical fashion. In fact, one could call it racist.
As far as the people of Wakanda ire concerned, blacks in the rest of the world are oppressed, stupid, violent, drug-addicted, and not worthy of Wakanda’s attention.
The movie does end addressing this briefly, but through most of its run time Wakandans are portrayed as proud separatists who want to have nothing to do with other races or even other blacks.
Of course, the left is over the moon about this film. As far as many liberals are concerned this is the first film that ever made blacks into heroes. Notwithstanding Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, or event Sidney Poitier, liberals are seriously trying to say that blacks have never been given staring roles in films before.
But what is more interesting is their insistence that “African culture” is being given a starring role in this film. But, the truth is it isn’t.
You see, the African nation of Wakanda does not exist. The “culture” we are seeing on the screen is invented for the comic book and the film. Indeed, much of the “history” of Wakanda was written by white comic book writers. Not all of it, granted, there have been black writers for Black Panther comics, but many white writers and artists had their hand in the creation of the comic book character upon which this film is based.
So, in actuality, there is no “African culture” in this film. It is all an invented fantasy. It is an amalgam of Africa. It is “Africa-like,” or pseudo African. In many ways it is no different than the sham African “culture” evinced in the onscreen jungle dancers replete with shields and spears, the like of which we’ve seen so many times before — 1964’s Zulu comes to mind — those pseudo Africa-based films that were made in the old days before social justice warriors made the portrayal verboten.
Yes, Black Panther treats its fake African culture with a seriousness and reverence that makes it perfectly comfortable to watch, but it is still not real African culture we are viewing. It is sham Hollywood flim flam of a portrayal.
In the end, it all amounts to one of the most racist movies that has hit the big screen in decades. But, it’s all OK, you see, because the social justice warriors have given the film their stamp of approval.
Well, all except the gay community, that is. Yes the LGBTQers are pissed off that the film didn’t have any gay characters included. But, I guess you can’t please every sector of social justice, incorporated.
Ultimately, if this was Marvel’s White Panther based on a white separatist nation that thought other races were inferior this film would be held up as the prime example of the worst sort of racism. And rightfully so, I might add. this film would be thoroughly racist if it were the “White Panther.”
But, since it portrays blacks as the supreme culture — well, a little racism won’t hurt ‘cha, T’Challa.
It is impossible not to see that this movie is the very definition of racism despite it being a black-centered movie. Thus we see how truly hypocritical liberals are. After all, this movie has become celebrated just for the very reason that it is so hugely racist.
Finally, I must again point out that none of this hurts the movie as far as this old white guy is concerned. Taking it as it is, the film was fun. I’m glad I went to the theater to see it and didn’t wait until it came out on DVD. It truly deserves its success.
But let’s just not ignore how racist Black Panther truly is.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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