Imagine children growing up watching a movie where the superhero looks like them, but so does the villain, the supporting characters and even the background characters. For the majority of America, that is already your reality so you may not understand, but I can try my best to help you to understand why this is important.
I’m walking out of my house, but before I leave I turn around and cross my arms in an X formation. Immediately my roommate understands and returns the gesture. Since seeing Black Panther on its premiere night, my roommates and I, like many other Black people around the world, haven’t been the same. It’s been a little over a week since we were able to travel to the fictional country of Wakanda, where Black Panther takes place. In the movie, Wakanda is located in the very real Continent of Africa. With a star-studded cast of beautiful Black actors, this movie proceeded to change my life in the short two hours I sat in the theater. For two hours, I got to watch Black people be the one thing the media usually don’t want them to be: superheroes. These superheroes were beautiful, strong, funny and intelligent.
Director Ryan Coogler, who is also behind Fruitvale Station and Creed, has once again outdone himself. The use of a fictional country like Wakanda allowed viewers to visualize what could happen if Africa was never colonized and it’s beautiful. Characters in this movie aren’t fighting for freedom, gang violence or even their white master, but they’re doing normal superhero things like saving their country. Although movies that educate us about our history are important, so are movies like Black Panther where we talk about Africa, what it means to be Black and the intersection of the two. Despite what some say, this movie was more than just a superhero movie. It takes on an issue and creates important discourse.
Courtesy: IMDb
One of my favorite things about Black Panther is the inclusion of female characters. The country’s greatest warriors are women. The country’s smartest engineer is a woman. This movie depicts a narrative I’ve always known, but not always seen: Black Women Are Amazing. Throughout this movie, I got to watch Black women kick butt and do other amazing things in the most normalized way. Shuri, who is played by newcomer Letitia Wright, is the young teenage innovator behind Wakanda’s high-tech gadgets. In a world where women are often left out of conversations of technology and S.T.E.M, we see a young Black girl challenging those stereotypes and creating her own herstory and I’m here for it.
With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes review and 361 million dollars in box office revenues, it’s safe to say that Black Panther is amazing (for the lack of a better word). In this day and age, we’re lucky if we get original content that also pushes the envelope and this movie does just that. With a predominantly Black cast, and non-Black characters not being imperative to the storyline, we’re seeing a new tale being told. Some may argue that media representation doesn’t matter, yet time and time again we see the media framing stories in light of stereotypes they’ve already created and overused. Representation gives people someone in the media to identify with that looks like them, and we need to normalize that for the minority groups of our country. We exist and we should be seen. We need to normalize Black superheroes, gay love stories, Hispanic family sitcoms, and anything else that makes someone who might feel alone like they belong. Black Panther was beautiful, well-acted, funny, absorbing and most importantly – needed.