Marvel tricks audiences into buying a fake, debilitating myth.
The genius behind Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the same kind of political genius found in LBJ’s often disputed but indelible prophecy: “I’ll have them nigras/Negroes/N-word voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Those evil geniuses at the Marvel Cinematic Universe calculate a dependable market from the millions who flocked to 2018’s Black Panther, so a sequel was inevitable, keeping customers loyal.
Wakanda Forever, set in the same fairy-tale kingdom, shamelessly reinforces the myth that Wakanda is a real African nation. For race-focused naïfs, Wakanda is the Afro-futurist fount of Millennial black intelligence, scientific advancement, and political sovereignty. MCU sells a homeland that resembles a paradisiacal shopping mall.
In this sequel, MCU goes rogue, taking a knee at the death of Wakanda’s king T’Challa (originally played by the late Chadwick Boseman). It opens with an elaborate memorial sequence that’s as out of proportion to reality as the spectacle of Nancy Pelosi’s Beltway posse donning fake kente cloths to kneel for the media-vaunted felon George Floyd; they instituted a crippling political myth designed to ultimately impair black American self-respect and self-sufficiency.
But Wakanda Forever’s fake ceremony (blending design from the legendary Busta Rhymes–Hype Williams Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See music video with an imaginary, regal state funeral — including T’Challa’s face on a billboard) is just preamble to the film’s ultimate political ploy. T’Challa’s death equals the demise of black patriarchy, to be replaced by matriarchal majesty.
Wakanda Forever’s progressivism follows the black emasculation recently seen in The Woman King. Hollywood repeats Black Lives Matter’s Marxist effort to destroy the family unit by appealing to the divide-and-conquer yearnings of black feminism. Wakandans Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira act out their off-screen ambitions and frustrations in a plot that gives them big-screen glory.
These ambassadresses, including Gurira’s female warriors the Dora Milaje, sustain Wakanda’s future (Bassett’s Queen Ramonda gives a fiery and anti-colonialist oration to the U.N.). Then, they negotiate with another third-world entity, the Talokan, a Mesoamerican-Mayan civilization of undersea amphibians who yearn for ruthless third-world power over the rapacious first world. Talokan’s bronze, muscular leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), a dazzlingly masculine Submariner, replaces the stereotypical black male threat of Michael B. Jordan’s show-stopping Killmonger. Through Namor’s representation of Indigenous heritage, the MCU exploits contemporary clichés about inclusion, diversity, and equity.
But how far can childish fantasy be pushed to change the political thinking of Millennial audiences? Director Ryan Coogler’s first films, Fruitvale Station and Creed, expressed contemporary racial frustration with surprising craft and deftness. But Coogler is no longer just the Oakland-born son of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. That Coogler could bowdlerize the actual BPP with this juvenile comic-book erasure seems unconscionable — if we weren’t already accustomed to betrayal by political mountebanks. It’s pathetic that Coogler and his woke allies think they’re performing a social and cultural service.
Now Coogler’s just a cog in the machine of a system that has fewer black studio heads than there are black NFL owners. His action-spectacle chops imitate the Russo Brothers’ Marvel standard in several CGI set pieces yet lack Zack Snyder’s panache, the intense, kinetic aesthetic that dramatizes personal struggle against specific moral affront. Wakanda Forever’s nearly three-hour length attests to its intention to outdo mere entertainment — in its aim to be taken seriously, it uses glib racial, feminist identity to indoctrinate audiences into cheering potential race war.
Here’s where the MCU is offensive. It exploits race to manipulate pop politics. There’s no dispute that black Americans occupy a cultural position that is susceptible to the whims of the political and commercial power structure. Wakanda Forever is even being advertised via tie-in marketing promotions from Lexus, McDonald’s Happy Meal, Sprite, Mastercard, Bevel Razors, MAC Cosmetics, Xbox, Adidas, etc.
This film’s outrageous Marvel-LBJ title proves that MCU perceives blacks as mere consumers and as children. Yet how many Marvel fans have read the great, serious black historians: Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus or John Henrik Clarke’s My Life in Search of Africa? Has any other social group ever had its history diminished to comic-book trivia and then encouraged to take that insult as a compliment? The brainwashing phenomenon of Wakanda Forever promotes ignorance of history — not uplift, but culturally enslaved escapism.
This sequel operates the same way the Democratic Party manipulates its black and brown voters by pretending to cater to their needs. The fallacy of T’Challa’s state funeral is a grim-faced repetition of how Aretha Franklin’s “homegoing” was turned into a Democratic Party rally — but worse, since the fictional T’Challa should inspire endless reincarnations like Superman or Batman. But Coogler seizes the mind-bending, culture-warping opportunity of serving the Hollywood plantation by whitewashing the fact that the industry laments only the loss of Boseman’s box-office potential.
Wakanda Forever not only traduces black American history; its Talokan subplot denigrates Pan-African diaspora as well. This hoodwink occurs when Hollywood disrespects the polity, and when the polity is as endlessly gullible as the LBJ legend suggested.
