the closing scene of the film Black Panther, which are well intended, if a little suspect. (Surreptitiously buying up land in impoverished areas isn’t so far from colonialism, and bringing Wakanda’s way of life to the poor schlubs of Oakland looks suspiciously like the Wakandan version of the White Man’s Burden. But hey, it’s a start).3 3. In his own words, “The command, ‘Obey the suzerain who has authority over you,’ does not ruminate on how the suzerain acquired this authority.” Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 140–141.
4 4. Her many exploits include killing the Radioactive Man (Black Panther, vol. 4, #6, 2005), becoming the Black Panther (Black Panther, vol. 5, #3–6, 2009), saving the planet from a black hole (Shuri, #5, 2018), and cheating death and returning as a stone-skinned, shape-shifting, entire-spiritual-memory-of-Wakanda-channeling avatar (Black Panther, vol. 6, #8, 2016).
5 5. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106–107. For a deeper dive into Kant’s ethics in the context of comic books, see S. Bein, “Frank Miller’s Batman as Philosophy: ‘The World Only Makes Sense When You Force It To,’” in David Johnson ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_15-1.
6 6. See Emmanuel Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Katherine Faull ed., Anthropology and the German Enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 196–237. See also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
7 7. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government II.2.6 (that’s second treatise, chapter two, paragraph six).
8 8. A historical note, since we got into Kant’s history too: Locke’s hands are cleaner than Kant’s. Personally he found slavery a great evil, and the very first sentence of his Two Treatises on Government is a damning rebuke of slavery. But he’s not squeaky clean: as a governmental employee, he had a hand (willing or unwilling) in the administration of slave-owning colonies. The historian Holly Brewer considers his record in “Slavery-entangled philosophy,”Psyche, at https://aeon.co/essays/does-lockes-entanglement-with-slavery-undermine-his-philosophy.
9 9. Black Panther, vol. 3, #4 (2016), 3.
10 10. Coates considers this in much greater depth than we can get into here. Check out his “The case for reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, 54–71, athttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631.
11 11. See Coates, “The case for reparations,” 62. Coates writes on the twenty-five times former congressman John Conyers proposed a study; Representative Sheila Jackson Lee proposed the same bill again in 2019 and it never made it out of committee.
12 12. Black Panther, vol. 3, #12, 2016. His method is based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid government – which, by the way, is a good example of restorative justice.
13 13. See Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press,1990), 184–185.
14 14. For an analysis of how this works, see Clarissa Rojas, Mimi Kim, and Alisa Bierria eds., “Community accountability: Emerging movements to transform violence,” Social Justice 37 (2011–2012), 4, 1–11.
15 15. A number of scholars and activists have written about the violence of prisons, the lack of justice in the justice system, and the need to abolish prisons to engage in transformative justice and community accountability. See the works of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, and Mimi Kim for some examples.
16 16. The ultra-maximum security prisons built for super-powered inmates in New Avengers and Civil War. See New Avengers #1 and Civil War: Front Line #5.
3 Sins of the Fathers Historical Injustice and Its Repair in Black Panther
Ben Almassi
SON: Baba?
FATHER: Yes, my son?
SON: Tell me a story.
FATHER: Which one?
SON: The story of home.
FATHER: Millions of years ago, a meteorite made of vibranium, the strongest substance in the universe, struck the continent of Africa, affecting the plant life around it. And when the time of man came, five tribes settled on it and called it Wakanda.
Black Panther tells a story with history, and despite arriving in 2018 as the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), this history is primarily its own, secondarily related to the real world, and only tangentially concerned with the wider events of the MCU.
The film’s rousing opening is a unifying creation myth every Wakandan child surely knows by heart. And Wakanda, as we first encounter it, seems like an ideal society – socially, technologically, aesthetically – triumphantly crowning its new king, T’Challa. For all its Afrofuturistic splendors, though, Wakanda’s history includes acts of injustice and wrongdoing that predate the story’s beginning and remain unresolved as the story begins. Such injustices include human trafficking in Nigeria where Nakia is undercover, appropriation of Wakandan and other African artifacts by the Museum of Great Britain, and the murder of T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka, during a terrorist attack in Captain America: Civil War.
Of course, the historical injustices really driving Black Panther are tragic deaths in 1991: the murder of W’Kabi’s parents and others by Ulysses Klaue while stealing vibranium from Wakanda, and then in Oakland, the fratricide of Wakandan prince N’Jobu by his brother T’Chaka. The first is an outrage which unites all of Wakanda in the aim of bringing Klaue to justice. The second is T’Chaka’s secret shame, which threatens to tear Wakanda apart.
Though he did not commit these wrongs, as king (and our hero) T’Challa holds himself responsible for their resolution, and so he must reckon with the conflicting responses to historical injustice of his father, his closest allies, and his cousin (and the film’s villain and tragic figure) N’Jadaka, a.k.a. Erik “Killmonger” Stevens.
