-------
Part 2: Appreciating Black Panther Beyond
The 12 Myths of Black Liberation
"These imaginings could be made to reconcile, but the movie’s director and writer (with Joe Cole), Ryan Coogler, makes viewers choose. Killmonger makes his way to Wakanda and challenges T’Challa’s claim to the throne through traditional rites of combat.
Killmonger decisively defeats T’Challa and moves to ship weapons globally to start the revolution. In the course of Killmonger’s swift rise to power, however, Coogler muddies his motivation.
Killmonger is the revolutionary willing to take what he wants by any means necessary, but he lacks any coherent political philosophy. Rather than the enlightened radical, he comes across as the black thug from Oakland hell bent on killing for killing’s sake—indeed, his body is marked with a scar for every kill he has made.
"The abundant evidence of his efficacy does not establish Killmonger as a hero or villain so much as a receptacle for tropes of inner-city gangsterism."
Chris Lebron was neither the first nor the only to criticize Black Panther. However, I sense the twelve myths of Black liberation being the unconscious foundation of his analysis, leading him to invalidate an artistic analysis of what is, in the final analysis, a fine piece of commercial art, not a political manifesto.
The unspoken requirements for the political and cultural liberation of Black people in the world as listed in the twelve myths are as contradictory as they are juvenile at heart. However, if you never expose them, they can be used to find fault with anything Black people do in the real world—good, bad or transformational—at any time. All while cultivating an illusion of moral and intellectual superiority in the critic for those who don’t know any better.
Perfection, as every artist knows, does not exist. The illusion of perfection is achieved through the reality of honest, sublime, beautiful imperfection. The myths of liberation, however, when surreptitiously used as the measuring stick for goodness or quality, stain what they are used to critique, because they rely on the lie that perfection is a responsibility, not an illusion.
They seduce adults into childishly treating perfection as an attainable end, even through the most convoluted and contradictory of means. The myths don’t invite us to engage with the real world before we critique it; they demand that we leave it, in illogical, uncreative, narcissistic, angry and unimaginative fashion.
The twelve myths, as such, are dark spells that poison the mind. They create dissociation & depression masquerading as militancy in the heart of the Black bewitched, not liberation. They obscure more truth than they could ever reveal.
I think Lebron took one look at Killmonger in Black Panther and unwittingly got twelve spells put on him—all of which prevented him from truly seeing the film.
