To be honest, I’m still slightly in a state of amazement after having watched Black Panther at last Thursday night’s early premiere in Cherry Hill.  Even though television and I are joined at the hip – I’ve been on this long string of political dramas lately including Scandal, Designated Survivor, and the recently stricken House of Cards – but I don’t actually go to the movie theater that often.  Most of the time, I’ll wait for a movie to be released on Netflix or some other internet-based provider to enjoy it in the comfort of my home.  Let me be clear, as someone who appreciates all things cinema and television but also home comfort, you should seriously take my recommendation when I say there should be no other place than a movie theater that you see Black Panther for the first time; and IMAX if you can get it makes it even better (which is how I watched it)!

Now that I’ve properly got my fangirl spiel out of the way, I want to get a little deeper into the movie itself.  I won’t get into the history and background of the character or the movie too much as I don’t think I’ll ever be a decent movie critic (despite the many years of television I’ve ingested), but here’s a link to a decent New York Times review.  Without getting into too many spoilers, I want to touch on some of the broader points that the movie proposes and how it landed with me personally; I’m sure there are points that will land with you as well.

Right out of the gate, the movie drops a major theme that will run throughout in focusing on the realities of struggling life for African Americans in urban communities.  This idea emerges of a secluded African country with advanced technology, science & medicine, and resources not being shared among other African countries and the diaspora at-large was an interesting direction for Director Ryan Coogler to take.  This notion was drawn out and exposed by the main antagonist of the movie, Killmonger (played by Michael B. Jordan) as a major flaw in Wakandans believing that their country was nothing less than perfect.  While the rest of the country and the diaspora had suffered under oppression and marginalization for centuries, Killmonger knew that Wakanda sat safely hidden away with its abundance of resources and cloaked supply of vibranium.  Historically, the throne’s response would be that this was done to preserve Wakanda’s way of life and to protect their vibranium from the rest of the world; essentially to avoid what would become inevitable war for both their country and the rest of the world.

To be honest, I think that this was one of the most moving components of the movie that hit home personally on a level I’ve been wrestling with as I become more involved with the community work throughout the city.  While I haven’t been attempting to keep this secret or under wraps, I do realize that I live in a very nice building here in Camden (the Victor Lofts) while doing work with groups that (many have told me personally) may have never even seen the inside.  This doesn’t mean that where I live now is any indication of how I lived while growing up.  My family and I grew up well under the poverty line; there were plenty of times my siblings and I went to bed starving while my parents figured out where our next meal would come from; our electricity wasn’t always working and we didn’t always have hot water – we’d have to go to a cousin’s house down the street or boil pots of water individually to bathe; I even shared a twin-size bed with my little brother until I was nine years old. 

But now when I go home, I have a concierge that greets me and central air and a dishwasher and all the other surroundings I need in my environment that makes it easier to turn off my what’s-happening-to-someone-else lens.  This is happening on a much larger scale in both our universe and the Black Panther’s where much more well-off occupants and descendants of the Motherland turn a blind eye to their people’s problems under this guise of self-preservation.  As foreign and unfamiliar (and to be honest at times extremely uncomfortable) it is for me to be living in a heightened state of privilege now, it’s extremely important that those of us who find ourselves in these spaces (especially people of color) to always be so much more aware of both our current standing in our community and the roots that allow us to stand.  I don’t know that I’ll ever be fully comfortable or at peace knowing that I have so much more than I did when I was growing up, and that I have so much more than a lot of other families struggling in this city like mine did.  The thing that makes it the most bearable from day to day is to constantly ask myself, “What am I doing with my voice?” and then taking action to make sure I don’t forget those roots.

That was the main point I wanted to make about the movie and its/my connections to the city, but I’ll add a few other things about the movie in a more general sense too because I still think there were a lot of learnable nuggets tucked away throughout.

The culture of Wakanda lent itself to an intense desire to study more African communities and understand how exactly they live and why they (choose to) live that way.  The street life, the clothing, the market places – the technology was fictional but still also makes you think about how it is being used currently in other developing countries and where it might go.  The fantastical world of Wakanda itself, as many reviews have already expressed, I feel was so closely designed and structured not just for the diaspora to absorb and identify with, but to also paint with a broader brush for the rest of the world.  Many African countries today are still very much looked down on as being “third World” and underdeveloped to the point that our imaginations create a false visage of these parts of the globe.  What this movie provides is an amazing blend of both rural and urban ways of life (bridged by the use of vibranium) to hold fast to the nation’s tradition while (secretly) outpacing the advancement of the rest of the world.

Finally, I want to touch on something that I have truthfully never considered until I watched Black Panther.  This people-that-look-like-me phenomenon that dictates (mainly to children or younger generations) that if someone looks like you on television or portrayed in mainstream media you’ll have a stronger connection to your own abilities to find yourself in that space.  This played out a lot when I watched Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008, but to be honest I never once thought to myself that I couldn’t be President even if he lost.  I have a natural and naïve inclination to believe that certain parts of reality don’t exist and can easily place myself in spaces that are fundamentally harder for an African American man to exist.  After watching this movie, all of those realities and all of those opportunities came crashing together into a pride-filled moment of grief.  For some reason everything about the circumstances and obstacles that people of color face were played out so subtly yet so profoundly to the point that by the time I walked out the theater I felt taller and humbler at the same time – kind of like Black royalty.