The King Is Dead

People outside the Black American community couldn’t understand what Black Panther meant to us. How could you? You have no context. Like most of our art, you missed it. The nuance. The regality. The reflection of our world into this imagined one.

But we are all T’Challa and Nakia. We are children born to bear the sins of our fathers. Our mothers and fathers were slaves stolen from the countries that belonged to us. How could you understand that? Everywhere your ancestors landed was through their own choice. How could you possibly appreciate a film that created a world where history was rewritten to remove the stain of colonization from our past? Wakanda is a Utopia of Blackness. Its rulers are Black. Its religions, Black. Its governing bodies, Black. And the culture it showcased gave an introduction to the range of African representation.

How could you know what that means? To see the large differences in the Jabari tribe, from the Sekmet tribe and the Sobek tribe. As a Black man, I have no context for what real Africa looks like, sounds like, feels like.

So often, I feel like N’Jadaka Erik Killmonger. N’Jadaka knew the colonizer. He knew the pain of growing up under oppression. Killmonger bore the scars of growing in a world that doesn’t love you. He knew a pain that was crushing him inside and all he wanted to do was make it go away. A child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

We are all N’Jadaka; angry at all the systems Whiteness has created to make us violent and then condemned the second we embrace the only thing that keeps us from taking our own lives.

We are all Killmonger. Descendants of a family that abandoned us in this foreign land when all we ever wanted to do was to find our way home. How could you know what that feels like? You can’t even begin to understand our experience. However, I’ll try to enlighten you a bit.

Imagine, being a citizen of a country where your very existence terrifies the protectors of this land, and they kill you. To make matters worse, the country where you hold citizenship uses every reason to justify your murder. Imagine you work a job with three other people. You all do the exact same job, have the same amount of education, and the exact same amount of experience. However, they have a different ethnicity than you and as a result, they take home 3 times the amount of money you do.

I could give a million examples, but the point is made. Now, imagine a country where those kinds of things didn’t happen and if they did, justice was the response to it. That is Wakanda. How could you know what that feels like? For many of you, racism just started but for Black Americans it is a daily hopscotch. So when we see a world that reflects the beauty we hope for, in spite of the ugliness we experience you couldn’t possibly understand the magnitude of it all.

Even other members of the diaspora didn’t fully get it. My West Indian ex told me that Black people were doing too much over this movie. We even got into a huge fight over the film before its premiere because I was discussing its impact on the perception of Black people. He thought Black people were just exaggerating. Needless to say, I flipped out. My Nigerian friend told me Black people shouldn’t wear our dashikis to the theaters because it was “cultural appropriation.” Imagine that! Black people, who have no real advantages here in America, have no permission to tap into the culture of the Motherland. To be African American is to be American with no privilege, and African with no memory. How could anybody know what this moment meant to us?

How could you know our hearts soared when we saw Lupita’s gorgeous melanin and high cheekbones on the big screen? How could you know the writhing conflict in our chest when N’Jadaka wouldn’t accept T’Challa’s help at the end of the film? And how could you tell us this work of art didn’t matter as much as it did? Art has the power to shift an entire culture. And you don’t know what Black Panther meant to The Culture. So, you don’t know how our hearts weep at the loss of Chadwick Boseman. Sleep well my King. Some of them may never know how much your life mattered.