Armond White: Black Panther’s Circle Of Hype
Image Credit: Marvel Studios
(Written by Armond White, pictured left) The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing.
This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience through its insecurities about heritage, social prestige, and empowerment. So Marvel’s new, instant blockbuster Black Panther appeals to adolescent fantasies about birthright and ethnic invincibility — dishing up the routine super-heroics of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a black version of Batman who fights crime dressed as a panther. He’s a recent addition to the Marvel Avengers series and the new king of Wakanda, a fictitious African nation devised by two of Marvel’s pseudo–social scientists, writer Stan Lee and illustrator Jack Kirby.
The Black Panther film and its hype are inseparable.
What motivates their methods of racial exploitation are confirmed by this week’s Time magazine: Its cover features Boseman, Black Panther’s star, handsomely replacing Time’s infamously racist, darkened O. J. cover, to prove that the publication has abandoned journalism to become a social-justice-warrior pamphlet. Combining youth and black exploitation is an effective propaganda tactic when audiences don’t recognize how they’re being manipulated; they’re simply flattered by it.
T’Challa’s superpowers, tight-fitting Panther outfit, and Shangri-La-style homeland (transferring the fabled El Dorado from the Western Hemisphere to Africa) distort actual history and anthropology the same way that TV, comic books, video games, and movies have supplanted traditional education and learning. Utopian Wakanda, hidden behind clouds and mountains away from European colonizers, resembles the faux-naïve heaven of the 1933 [black] musical Green Pastures. But the old-timey Christianity in that film is now replaced by faux-naïve Afrocentricity, including clichéd tribal customs (T’Challa must fight challengers to his throne).
During the radicalized 1960s, Green Pastures’ stereotypes were considered an outrage. Black Panther would seem similarly fake if people weren’t falling for it without question. Once again, we see the nation’s psychic wounds — and black folks’ desperate need for whites’ appreciation — exposed by stripping off the Obama bandage.
Black Panther offers no mystical alternative to racism’s threat, or the helplessness engendered by the tragedy of slavery (the original sin of removing Africans from their real and imagined roots). Instead, the movie offers a panacea, a comic-book fantasy of black empowerment that exchanges the actual history of the ’60s Black Panthers for a superficial commercial remedy. Rather than any account of that hopeful, aggrieved, inspiring, yet violent and always controversial social-activist group, we get the story of a monarchy.
Even elderly academics and young Afro-futurists who prattle about “revolution” have unaccountably joined the circle of Black Panther hype, as if it was somehow a protest. They accord an oddball sanctity to the media practice that persuades the public to cheapen its own best interests. The horror of seeing the makers of Black Panther on the stump, invoking the names of serious historians from Dr. John Henrik Clarke to Ivan van Sertima, twisting their principled, arduous studies into promotional fodder, suggests an intellectual setback. The film’s frivolous sci-fi technology and gladiatorial fisticuffs can only assuage this moral betrayal momentarily — through cheeky ripostes about imperialism. (A Wakanda woman throws an ideological spear: “Don’t scare me like that, colonizer!”) Black Panther turns racial politics into what Malcolm X called “politricks.”
