Yet more Black Panther skepticism

First:   I call on Jason Soon to tell us what you thought of the movie.  [Please].

And then read the skeptical analysis of the race politics of the movie (not so dissimilar from the take on it in Boston Review I posted about before) which has appeared in Esquire.    Some bits:

When it comes to Killmonger, Black Panther’s politics are not especially liberatory, especially since the film’s title (not to mention its Oakland bookends) evoke the revolutionary politics of Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, and the Black Panther Party. While often hilariously anti-colonial in characters’ laugh lines, Black Panther’s major plot wants the audience to root for T’Challa largely because as the legitimate male son; he has a respectable blood claim to Wakanda’s throne—and what is a more colonialist ideology than upholding the divine right of kings?....

Killmonger wants to use Wakanda’s weapons to stop the suffering of Black people globally, and we, the audience, are manipulated into rooting against this because we live in an ideology in which nonviolence is always expected of Black people no matter what. As James Baldwin wrote, “The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes… is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.” I could not bring myself to root against Killmonger’s desire to help the Black diaspora any more than I could begrudge him wanting to take the throne of his child of the man who’d killed his father. 

But most disappointing was how Killmonger was morally positioned in contrast to the white CIA agent, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman). Coogler sets up the audience to dislike Killmonger because he was made to kill many people by the U.S. military; meanwhile, after saving a Wakanda woman’s life, Ross was turned into your friendly neighborhood CIA agent. Every scar on Killmonger's hot, shirtless torso is for someone he’s taken out—including many Black people. It is Ross (while using Shuri’s technology) who actually stops Killmonger’s crew from exporting weapons from Wakanda to help Black people....

While the audience was positioned not to forgive American-bred violence in Killmonger, we were positioned to forgive it in Agent Ross.

 The rehabilitation is also a kind of absolution of American imperialism, granting cover to how the CIA (in our Wakanda-less world) has been arming African countries and playing them against each other for decades. Meanwhile, when Killmonger chooses death over help from T’Challa and talks about the middle passage, he doesn’t speak of becoming enslaved in terms of America—but as something the African nation of Wakanda might do to him. It was painful to see Africa and an African American pitted against each other this way, while a CIA agent was redeemed.