In the article ‘Black Panther’ Is Not the Movie We Deserve’, the author discusses the movie Black Panther and gives his own take on the ideals in the movie and connects the movie to the African american experience in america. In the article, he discusses how the movie at first looks like a movie supporting black power and the rights for African Americans, but he argues that when you dig deeper, the movie in actuality vilifies African Americans and portrays them as villains.

However, what I find interesting are two points that he brings up. One was that he criticizes the role of the white CIA agent in the movie and the other point was when he talked about killmonger being treated unfairly by the movie compared to others like the CIA agent. To the first point, I completely disagree because the CIA agent was more of a side-kick to the main cast and only had two heroic scenes in the movie, which was taking a bullet for Zuri and shooting down the gunships before they left Wakanda. Additionally, he wasn’t really central to the main story line of the conflict between T’challa and Killmongerer and if the issue is that the CIA agent is white, that is very discriminatory. To the second point, the vilification of Killmongerer makes perfect sense, as he not only killed many innocents along the way to his rise to the Wakandan throne, but he additionally wanted to kill millions and millions of people in a race war as a way to “liberate blacks from suffering around the world”, which is very much a bad thing. Additionally, his death in the end makes perfect sense when it comes to his character, as throughout his life, he was radicalized by his father’s ideas and opinions on the “colonizers” and throughout his life, he was so blinded by hate that he was willing to do anything to achieve his radicalized goal of getting back at the “oppressors”, not for equality or justice or anything, just pure revenge.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.