By: Isatou Ndure
Black Panther was a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon. It was about more than a superhero’s journey. It championed Black culture. The 2018 film made box-office history with its excellent reviews, which began conversations all over social and traditional media alike. It is the 13th highest-grossing film of all time.
For many African Americans and individuals of African descent, it was a momentous occasion: Marvel’s first black superhero movie. When African Americans were gambling with their lives in the 1960s to challenge bigotry where they lived and worked, Stan Lee enacted integration with the first mainstream Black superhero, T’Challa, the technologically advanced African nation leader of Wakanda. Lee and his co-creator Jack Kirby famously created Black Panther in 1966. T’Challa is proof that Stan Lee, his writers, co-creators, and specialists who came after in their footsteps knew that Black people deserved proper representation in comics.
In the ’60s, characters such as Black Panther, Luke Cage, and the X-Men were the warriors in Lee’s fight against real-world enemies: prejudice and xenophobia. Under Lee’s authority, Marvel Comics presented to a generation of readers the African sovereign who rules a legendary and innovatively progressive kingdom, the Black ex-con whose brown skin repels bullets, and the X-Men, a group of heroes who battled prejudice because of their genetics.
The premise behind T’Challa, the Black Panther; Luke Cage, and Professor Xavier’s band of mutants — groundbreaking amid the 1960s and 1970s — became a cultural sprint that jumped over hurdles of bigotry towards the finish line of diversity and representation.
Black Panther provoked discussions about the influence of representation. It was a revolutionary triumph for Black culture and Black excellence because of its spectacular cast and crew.
The term Black excellence has become popular with good reason. Across all mediums, Black people are pushing back on misrepresentations of themselves as threatening, savage, and worthless to society. From television and film to news coverage and education, they have taken up the call of Black excellence to elevate and celebrate the achievements, commitments, and abilities of their own.
Black Panther lived up to the action genre expectations with edgy battle scenes and combined all the ingredients needed to make a badass-superhero with a science fiction approach and memorable outfits. Ruth Carter, the head costume designer, relied on South African, Kenyan, and Namibian styles as sources to perfect the film’s collection of looks, following not only the tribal differences that lie inside Wakanda but the differing qualities of Black culture and personality as well.
The film is a pivotal stamp of approval for Black people who had been eager for the opportunity to celebrate everything from Afrofuturism to the natural hair movement that society regularly criticizes.
With its divine technological advancements, rich history, and tribal monarchy, the leaders and Wakanda became a paradigm for Black excellence. Director Ryan Coogler had successfully made a superhero movie that was immovably rooted in Black culture.
Black Panther provided a multitude of teaching moments that helped us understand society and embolden hope for future generations. Let’s take into consideration, Shuri, T’challa’s younger sister and princess of Wakanda, played by the amazing Leticia Wright. Shuri spent much of her time in her lab inventing technological wonders utilized by the Wakandan people. Seeing Shuri in an environment such as a lab could inspire numerous young Black girls to consider pursuing science and technology as a career. Shuri’s character shows how instrumental STEM (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics) is to progressing civilization and their communities. Black Panther and Wakanda were ahead of their times in more ways than one. After the death of talented actor Chadwick Boseman, the movie resonates in the hearts of many stronger than ever. It was in numerous ways a fundamental cure for African Americans in 2018, a remedy that allowed Black people to champion their own cultural identities in a world that has worked so hard to suppress African culture.
