The Two Killings of T'Challa the Black Panther.
The first killing occurred unceremoniously and dare I say unnecessarily in Avengers Infinity War and with the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman there is now talk of killing T'Challa the Black Panther a second time. NY Times bestselling author Steven Barnes wrote an impassioned article entitled Long Live The King: The Case For Recasting “Black Panther”. Here is his post.
Long Live The King: The Case For Recasting “Black Panther”
By Steven Barnes
I feel only the deepest sympathy for Chadwick Boseman’s family, and while it might seem precipitous to discuss “what comes next?” for the Black Panther franchise, I think it inevitable that the Internet has already been flooded with opinions. The two major choices seem to be: Shall we recast the role? Or promote his brilliant sister Shuri to that role, as happened in the later comics? (After 40 years of T’Challa tales).
I don’t know what Chadwick thought on his deathbed. Or what his spirit might think of the question now. I can only say that if it were me, and I had seen the sheer delirious pleasure felt by Black Americans experiencing King T’Challa’s ascendance…I would want to separate the myth from the man: all men die, but the myths must live on. To start that flame was the honor. Others can now feed it, keep it alive. Carry it to victory.
And I want to give my thoughts on why recasting is, from my perspective, the best of non-optimal choices. NO MATTER WHAT is done here, the results will be bittersweet at best. But they can also be transcendent, triumphant. The King is dead. Long live the King.
The “Black Panther” comic character was created in July 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in specific answer to the question: where are the black superheroes? While there had been some minor creations before that point, having Marvel’s flagship characters The Fantastic Four dazzled by the prince of Wakanda, a mysterious figure with Captain America’s physical prowess and Tony Stark’s intellect and stupendous wealth, was world-shattering for me.
I’d literally never seen anything like it. The character was an instant hit, although he had difficulty sustaining his own comic book. But when the MCU burst to life, and he was brought to cinematic life in 2016’s CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, he hit the screen like a grenade. I saw that movie in a Black neighborhood, sitting in an audience who had, of course, seen Blade, and Falcon, and Iron Patriot. But when we caught the first glimpse of T’Challa at that United Nations conference, excitement rippled through the audience.
And when he kissed his father T’Chaka’s ring, his father, King of Wakanda cupping his cheek fondly, I cried. I had NEVER seen such a gesture of affection between two powerful Black men. When he vowed vengeance for his father’s death, I FELT that. It felt like Muhammad Ali’s “I’m the greatest!” lifted to the Nth power.
Black men simply hadn’t been allowed to have that kind of pride in self. Heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan had been famous for stalking into a bar, slamming his fist down and roaring “I can whip any goddam sonofabitch in the world!” and white America LOVED him for it.
Ali’s “I’m the Greatest” was anathema. He was a MAN, unapologetically, with the same pride and arrogance celebrated in heroes from Achilles to Bond…but that pride and power, that “if you touch my family I’ll rip your throat out” clarity celebrated by all world cultures through all time (and now, of course, sometimes demonized as “toxic masculinity”) was specifically part of what was stripped away from African males during slavery. The most aggressive and strong were killed. The others were broken if possible, forced to accept their roles as something not quite human. Unable to protect their women’s chastity or prevent their children from being sold away.
And while every group of IMMIGRANTS brought with them their mythologies, languages, religions, cultures, languages, and history…ALL of that was stripped away in the slave trade, homogenized. Imagine stripping all programs from a human computer and installing “Slave 1.0” software. Then after 250 years you reluctantly install “Freeman 1776” on that computer while never quite erasing the original software, and employing another century and a half of Sharecropping, Sundown Laws, Jim Crow, and Segregation malware, all the time piously denying any of that was happening. “The playing field is level — the problem is YOU.”
Might you expect some software conflicts? Some crashing?Our hardware is great. But frankly, some of our software, installed by a society that does not love us…sucks. It is one thing to mug someone. Another to knock them to the ground and piss on them. As vile as that is, it is an entirely different and deeper level of evil to mug them, knock them down, break their legs, urinate on them and then say “look at that smelly, broke bum. He must have been BORN with broken legs. He must ENJOY laying in the gutter.” That…that is beyond mere animal predation. That is evil. That is what happened to us, and what we’ve struggled against for generations.
There is a very real reason that I’ve spent my entire adult life creating myths and stories: I was denied them as a child. I watched stories of heroes, and when people who looked like me appeared, they were secondary, or criminal, stupid, cowardly. Or Disposable: I can list well over a hundred films in which EVERY Black character, or Black man died. Every one. The vilest are when they die protecting white people, or dying to motivate their white friends to righteous anger, sob sob.
And I’d just bet you can’t name A SINGLE AMERICAN FILM in which EVERY white character (anyone with a line of dialogue) died, if any POC survived. (I can. After years of searching I finally found one. Needless to say, it is little known and got no distribution. And no, I’m not telling you the title.)
I remember when I wrote my first solo science fiction novel, starring a character described as being as black-skinned as a Zulu. They put a white guy (maybe a touch of Asian) on the cover. NO ONE at the publishing company would take responsibility. My poor editor was in tears. The editor in chief said it was the fault of the art department. The art department blamed the marketing department. The marketing department blamed the TRUCK DRIVERS who would put the book on the shelves. If they thought it was “Shaft In Space” you see, they wouldn’t give it a good position…
No one could or would take responsibility.
You know, I remember reading about the British Army. If someone broke into the kitchen and stole food and no one confessed, it was assumed the entire company was at fault, covering for the culprit. It was the entire CULTURE, the entire unit that was punished, until someone stepped forward and confessed.
If no one confessed, then everyone was guilty.
So I developed a theory: that this was a low-level racism pervading the entire culture. A very few INDIVIDUALS would admit it, but there weren’t enough allies to reverse the aggregate impact. Everyone just contributes a tiny push, a tiny flinch of personal aversion. But the cumulative effect is massive. If a million people line up, and each of them just slaps you lightly once, by time the last of them march by, every bone in your face would be crushed, and you are going to be DEAD.
It’s nowhere. So…its everywhere.
But I saw the risk in seeing that: was I demonizing white people? If racism is “the differential attribution of capacity or worth based on race or ethnicity” as I have held all my life, wasn’t I being PRECISELY what I abhorred if I thought such a thing?
Take a step back from the precipice. What if this was a universal human trait? Most humans seem to be tribalistic. That’s born in the “My mommy is the prettiest, my dog the smartest, my daddy the strongest” thing that all kids have, and most grow out of. (Well…my Mom WAS the prettiest…)
Just to help you understand, the way I think about it: “Tribalism” is cheering for the home team. “Racism” is actually thinking the other team are bums, and virulent “bigotry” is knee-capping their quarterback. There are gradations. I looked out at the world as a young writer, and realized that I’d walked into hundreds of bookstores and seen countless thousands of SF books, and the covers on all of them could be reduced to “white people and their imaginary friends.” I watched movies like WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and saw George Pal neglect to save a single Black person. We all died. No one even noticed.
And I realized, sick to my stomach, that I had a real, genuine problem. Like anyone with a healthy ego, I protected myself from fear of failure with bravado. I had ambitions as high as the sky. But literally NO ONE with my skin color had ever accomplished what I sought to do. And I had reason to believe this was not an accident. Not a statistical fluke. I was running into a real barrier. Should I quit? Give up? I refused. And looking at the curve of social change, I reckoned, back in about 1985, that it would take another generation or so until there was enough progress for me to even have a whisper of a chance of success. I literally had to wait for another generation or two of bigots to die off, figuring that their grandchildren would have less motivation to defend lies and hold the line
.
One measure was “Network hour long drama with a black lead (person whose name comes first in the credits) lasting over two seasons.” That finally happened with 2006’s THE UNIT, starring Dennis Haysbert. One measure was “Black man having a love scene in a movie that earns over $100 million domestic.” That line was finally crossed in 2015’s CREED.
And of course, Barack Obama’s election was another indicator that things were moving in the right direction. In other words, the 21st Century was finally kicking in. And since that time we’ve seen some serious cultural change…including push-back. I believe that is what we are experiencing in our political arena, at this very moment: people who believe “Obama made race relations worse” were simply finally forced to admit to what WE had seen and experienced for centuries. When I wrote for the 1980’s version of TWILIGHT ZONE and OUTER LIMITS I wrote black characters who were changed to white by the producers. The OUTER LIMITS people actually told me they COULDN’T cast black, because there weren’t any black people in Vancouver BC where they filmed, and they’d have to import Negroes…Honest. They said that.
So if I could hunker down, and somehow survived emotionally without becoming embittered, I reckoned that somewhere after 2000 my time would come. And while there are still massive problems, including those stemming from 400 years of oppression and persistent denial, the smartest, strongest, and best of my brothers and sisters are finding their way in. Sammy Davis Jr. had to be a quadruple threat to be allowed to stay in hotels where he performed. The “you have to be twice as good to get half as far” thing.
Now? I’d estimate you only have to be 50% better to get similar results. Twenty years ago, my wife Tananarive Due and I pitched her novel THE GOOD HOUSE in Hollywood with Forest Whitaker and Blair Underwood. And executives loved it. But rejected it after asking: “Do the characters have to be black?” I remember the pride of looking around at my allies at that table, Blair and Forest and producers Nia Hill and D’Angela Proctor …and realizing we were going to walk out of that room without a check…but with our pride intact. Tananarive and I were hurting for money. But we would not betray our trust.
https://stevenbarnes-87684.medium.com/long-live-the-king-the-case-for-recasting-black-panther-9f59f6ce1b3e
I have NO IDEA how I missed this INCREDIBLE article!
Steve Barnes, my HEFfa brethren, CHANGED MY LIFE with his story GORGON CHILD.
Idk that Street Lethal existed until about a year after I read GORGON CHILD. And I loved EVERY SECOND of the book...even though I was more than pissed at Aubry Knight's depiction of being highly intelligent, nearly superhumanly gifted physically but barely literate.
Steve [ and I had no idea that he was married to the mighty Tananarive ] changed EVERYTHING for me. He was what I aspired to be, insofar as writing is concerned. He has 3 Black Belts, I have 14. He was the very first person to write a prose story that centered around a Black man who WASN'T a stereotype or sidekick or basically a White dude dipped in chocolate. I wasn't thrilled that Barnes didn't have Knight be an expert in Kipura miscalled "Capoeira", but Idk if Barnes even knew if Kipura miscalled "Capoeira" existed in 1984 when he first started writing GORGON CHILD.
Today was the first time that I read Steve Barnes' Facebook posts, and his every sentence hit HOME to and for me. The scenes he pointed out...especially when Florence Kasumba told Black Widow to "Move or you will be moved." took me back specifically to RH having The Dora Milaje defeat The Black Widow in combat. I absolutely LOVED that scene.
RH? When you and your artist Koi brought those images to life, I brought that comic book specifically to my daughters.
And I absolutely love the chivalry RH had T'Challa display when he said: "I would never fight a woman..."
The BP that I write? Still has never attempted to physically batter a woman in combat [ training and sparring is a different matter entirely ]. And wouldn't do so, either.
Ya know...Steve Barnes could also write Black Panther, although my first choice is still REDJACK. Steve could also write Falcon. Or Cage. Or BLADE. In a solo.
