Tulsa v Wakanda, Forever

 I interrupted my re-viewing of “Black Panther” to watch a PBS documentary on the Tulsa race massacre (née riot, apparently).  I’m working my way through the movies in “timeline” order (the fictional timeline of the MCU) for reasons of my own, and interrupted the movie just as the antagonist of the story has deposed the rightful king, T’Challa.  But “Killmonger” (the bad guy) acts within the laws and rules of Wakanda.  He defeats T’Challa in single combat, and seemingly kills him.  T’Challa’s mother and sister and “girlfriend” react with shock and horror.  The queen mother can’t believe what she has just seen, can’t imagine a Wakanda run by a usurper who wants to use the power of Wakanda to rule the world (don’t get hung up on the comic book details here).  That is not the Wakanda she has lived in all her life, that she expected to continue under her son. 

Watching the story of the Tulsa massacre, I realized the “Black Panther” movie had created a very clever hat trick:  they had persuaded a white audience to sympathize with the “good guys” in a film where blacks/Africans dominate, by making the “good guy” blacks…white.  The fear, the terror, the emotional shock of the death of T’Challa, is not just the loss of a son/brother/lover, it’s the loss of everything they thought permanent and true and safe, by a black stranger and usurper arriving and demanding justice for what was done to him.

It turns out Killmonger is T’Challa’s cousin, the son of his uncle, his father’s brother.  He comes seeking justice because T’Challa’s father killed his brother (Killmonger's father, if you're getting lost in the pronouns) over a betrayal, and left the young son alone in America, returning to Wakanda after the deed.  That’s the justice Killmonger seeks:  not only for dispersed Africans suffering under unjust systems throughout the world, but justice for himself, vengeance for the death of his father.

Which is one root of white fear of a brown planet:  that justice will be done on us.  That justice might well look like the scene when T’Challa falls in combat:  the shock of what that means, how it happens, how it could happen and destroy, by the laws of the government, the very government the royal family relied on. (And yes, we've discussed this before, although it's been a few years.) The kingdom immediately recognizes the new king; but he is an unjust king, an evil king, a usurper king only interested in his version of “justice.”  The white audience (especially) finds it all to easy to sympathize with the black royal family:  their shock and fear is our shock and fear, if “restorative justice and restitution” were ever enacted on us.  “Full throated accountability” sounds like our legal system, the one we rely on for our wealth and comfort (again, like the royal family of Wakanda) turned against us.  

The royal family has to flee for their lives, afraid immediately that the new king will kill them to cement his power.  Whites in America (some, not all; let’s not generalize because racism, at its heart, is generalization) fear just such a measure of justice.

But how do we deny it, too?  T’Challa returns from apparent death to confront Killmonger, but he tries to reconcile with him (it’s a movie; the bad guy has to lose.  He kills people for his goals, after all; good guys just threaten collateral damage to achieve their goals, and that’s different, right?  American military power may kill of lot of innocents, but we don’t mean to, and we try not to, and that matters more, right?).  In the end, T’Challa even uses the fantastic resources of Wakanda to help the world.  So all’s well that ends well.

Now, of course, both the protagonist and the antagonist are black in this movie, and the protagonist has the right attitude about the injustices visited on the antagonist, even going so far as to say his father may have created a problem he (the son) and the kingdom now have to deal with.   In the movie, it’s not a race thing; but in the real world, it so clearly is.  Killmonger is the “bad” black guy, T’Challa and his family are so good they might as well be white.  I’m not saying this to criticize or lambaste the movie; I’m pointing out the main reason the movie was successful was because white people could identify with a black family because their despair and sorrow is what we imagine ours would be:  justice done for Killmonger is injustice done to them and, they insist, to the kingdom.  Do we not say the same thing when we cringe, react, reject, the very idea of reparations, of recompense?  The documentary on Tulsa makes much of the loss of money, the generational damage, done to the material well being (to say nothing of the spiritual) of families whose ancestors were murdered or simply dispossessed by that massacre the state of Oklahoma didn’t even acknowledge until the end of the 20th century.  Do we, the people of white America in charge, still, of the government, recognize the justice of reparations?  Or do we insist we didn’t do it, it wasn’t our fault, why should we pay, even through taxes?

What white American wouldn’t want a chance to defeat the black enemy while still recognizing that, you know, maybe some black lives do matter? In the end, the "bad guy" is defeated and accepts his death (rather than lose his liberty), thus cleaning up all problems of keeping him alive where others might be swayed to his point of view (such as how weak the governmental system is of a country with so much technological power and potential wealth.  Pretty shaky system of absolute power in a monarch who hasn't so much as a group of counsellors to check his power.).  All the bad consequences of a very bad decision are eliminated by good intentions and paternal benevolence.

All very American, in the end.  It's pretty much how we've ignored Tulsa for over 100 years, while everyone is aware of Emmett Till and his supposed transgression (reports are the massacre in Tulsa started under much the same circumstances; but no one is as sure as they are about the allegations against young Mr. Till).  We blame the "crowd" for bad intentions, deny our complicity, and bury the deed so no responsibility can attach to us.  Now we discuss it, and the talk is of reparations, this time in the specific rather than the broadly generic (slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow).  But not one has actually said anything specific about what reparations would be made, and to whom, and from whom.  The city of Tulsa?  The state of Oklahoma?  The U.S. Treasury?  How will we approach this, much less allocate responsibility?

One thing is certain, in one way we will remain very different than the fictional nation of Wakanda.  The movie ends implying Wakanda will use it's wealth and technology to make life better for American blacks in particular; and maybe for Africa's children across the globe.  But this is real life, and we’re not gonna go crazy and use our fantasy technology to make poor people rich. I mean, that’s just nuts.