And Then . . . Black Panther

Going to the theater with my family to watch the black Panther incited various emotions from me including excitement over this highly anticipated film, and anxiety. So, I am a clinical social worker in the Washington D.C. metro area, and I am always telling my clients to observe and accept what they are feeling. AND, when the time is right, to examine the source of those feelings. This was a time for me to put my advice into action. I was worried. I was worried on so many different levels, I could have made myself sick, if not for the therapeutic tools I had at my fingertips. If this movie sucked, I had committed myself to seeing it at least once more, for the culture, with lies already prepared on my lips about how it was. I was prepared to find one good quality and speak only on it, as though it was the whole of my experience. I was prepared to excuse the status quo Eurocentric beauty standards which have been foisted upon audiences from the beginning–actresses with light skin who seem racially ambiguous, made up to be just Black enough but not too Black. Long straight hair, in lighter colors, or wigs that relegate kinks and coils to wig caps, relaxers, and disapproving gazes. You know, the regular. I expected that if there was a romance, it would be after the lightest skinned actress they could find, whoever could be mistaken for Becky, with the good hair.

Through the opening credits at the AMC Theater in Alexandria Virginia–a theater my family and I chose because of the IMAX quality and the seat assignments, that didn’t stop us having to tell someone to move the hell on from our pre-paid for real estate–I took a deep breath and prepared to accept what came. After all, if it sucked, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, but sit there and watch it.

Now as you read this piece, please keep this in mind: Black folks have been subjected to all kinds of movies that show them however they were gonna be shown. Maybe we were the token Black, you know the ONLY person of color with a line or two that shows us as sassy, relegating Black womanhood to the role of Sapphire in those moments. Maybe there were a bunch of Black folks in the film, but they were gangsters, or thieves, or “low lives.” I don’t have an issue with these, as long as there is other representation, and there always seems to be a problem with having more representation. Then there’s my personal room of loathing: slave films. Movie after movie that showed the start of Black history on cotton fields, doing as we are bid. Slave movies that are repeatedly shown through a white supremacist colonizer’s perspective. This White Savior, to whom we owe our eternal thanks. We have the undue pleasure of having white audiences leave theaters with self-satisfaction that they would have helped us, despite our Blackness, to achieve some basis in human rights. Stories told from their perspectives that while they feel great, leave Black audiences feel like they have been robbed of a sense of who they actually were. Leaving a false note that slaves were content to be so until whiteness decided to draw them up from the depths and makes them “lesser-equals.” We show movies about slavery in a way that we would never allow stories of the Holocaust, to be told from the perspective of the Nazi. To give them something to shine on and pat themselves on the back for. To expect a look of thankful wonderment on the faces of those who lost much from their hands. The tv show, Underground started to write a check that white audiences couldn’t cash. Telling the story of slavery from the point of the slave, and hurting every feeling they could while they did it. Receipts were on display, and it seemed that there was a shaking free from the false ideologies that...