Minorities don’t often see themselves represented on the big screen. When they are, the representation usually marginalizes and stereotypes their minority group.
Black Panther, released last February, was a cultural game changer because it celebrated black culture and challenged earlier perceptions of black culture. From the lead characters, the language, music, costume design, and the locations of where the movie was filmed, everything incorporated traditional African culture, tribes, history, and community to celebrate the beauty and strength in African culture.
It also gave a more real and well-rounded look of what it means to be black than we have ever seen in the media industry. This is why the film Black Panther film is so important. The media industry should be doing more to diversify the cultures it is representing and showcasing them as realistically as possible to capture the strength and beauty within these cultures. Then it can help raise cultural awareness and continue to empower minorities.
As Chadwick Boseman recently stated at the 91st Screen Actors Guild Awards, “We wanted to show the world that we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing that we could create a world that exemplified a world that we wanted to see.”
In the film, we saw an African city that had never been colonized. The city of Wakanda is a high-tech futuristic bustling city with vibranium-powered skyscrapers, soaring spaceships, and high-speed trains, just to name a few things. The portrayal of Wakanda is huge because it challenges past perceptions of the African peoples presented in older literature as savage, backward, and unintelligent, like novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
This is one of the reasons why I love the character Shuri in the film. As a princess, inventor, and leader of all technological operations in Wakanda, she is a powerful example of a brilliant woman of color. This may improve the mental psyche of an audience because according to a Syfy article, “Evidence shows that when audiences see on-screen representations of themselves, particularly aspirational ones, that experience can fundamentally change how they perceive their own place in the world. Black people have been historically underrepresented on screen, and black women in strong roles even more so. Shuri provides a science-y role model for black women, a group distinctly underrepresented in STEM fields.”
Thus it’s incredibly important that we have more strong, smart, impactful women of color on the screen because it could encourage younger generations of women that they too one day can be as accomplished and successful as Shuri if they choose to.
We also see strong black females Nakia and General Okoye, who are both badass, intelligent, fierce role models. Throughout the film we see them fight in multiple scenes and defeat any males that stand in their way. But we also see their compassion and reason when they advise T’challa. Their roles also play into the overarching theme in the film that females are strong fierce warriors (as seen in the army of Wakanda women). If anything, women take center stage in Black Panther as they hold many distinct roles like warrior, fighter, scientist, mother, queen, and more. This empowers women of color because it offers representations of themselves, their potential, and possibility.
Black Panther as a whole was a monumental film and it has paved the way for a large increase of minorities depicted in films. Examples of this are Crazy Rich Asians, Spiderman into the Universe’s African-Puerto Rican lead Miles Morales, Miss Bala, Nappilly Ever After, among many others.
I don’t know about you, but I am excited to see the emerging diversity in the film industry and I hope it continues to expand and represent minority cultures.