If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.
–T.S. Elliot, “Little Gidding”
“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors. They knew that death was better than bondage!”
So goes Eric Killmonger into death. He was the villain. Yet my reptile mind was drawn to the toxic masculinity of his charisma. He wanted to use violence and technology to give black people what marching and moral suasion had not. He forsook Nakia’s peaceful methods and wanted to burn the world in his image; if I wasn’t nursing a wine in my hand I would have reflexively put up a fist.
I empathized with the historical rage inherent in Killmonger’s personhood. I also considered the personhood of the black boy sitting to my right in the theater. He had an Afro and black glasses and skin like the early sun. I let the weekend pass before I began outlining and settling in on a question I wanted to explore. How could Killmonger’s conception of his personhood influence the one of the young black boy who watched Black Panther with me? Despite the cast, many of the hands involved in shaping Black Panther in being a box office dominating force were white. An uncomfortable reality of black personhood is that it is too often shaped by white creators of fiction.
Black Panther debuted in a 1966 Fantastic Four comic written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. Legend has it that both writer and penciler were deeply interested in the Civil Rights Movement. In particular, a lot of their writing was focused on the dichotomy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—best represented in the relationship between Professor Xavier and Magneto in their X-Men comics.
T’Challa is the black man white people thought we wanted. He was the king of an unconquered land, the scion of a lineage of unbroken kings. Within his fiefdom were unparalleled resources and a thriving society independent of white supremacy. Surely such a man would want cooperation with the Western world in defending Earth from the threats no single hero could withstand? From this point, his mainly white writers had him join the Avengers as a member.
But no real king would submit himself to the command of men who held no titles. He served as an Avenger, but never as the unquestioned leader. His talents and skill were never in question so long as it was subservient to the white leaders of the team. Later black writers such as Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin, and Ta-Nahisi Coates haven taken T’Challa’s renovation seriously. He now serves as a leading force in the teams he is a part of. He puts his nation first beyond all other concerns. It has taken black writers to reject T’Challa’s original creators in order to produce a more logical and true character.
Characters never escape the inertia of their creators. 20 years after white men made T’Challa the black overman, black writers have worked to bring him down to earth while retaining his best qualities. His development, in essence, is an argument that black writers have had with his white creators.
We see similar struggle with Killmonger. He was created by white writers in 1973. By this time, the Civil Rights Movement had faded into riots throughout frustrated northern and Mideastern cities. Detroit; Newark; Philadelphia; Chicago—these were places that did not benefit from segregation being declared unconstitutional. And just as Lee and Kirby drew from the hope of the Civil Rights Movement and gave us the ultimate black man, Don McGregor and Rich Buckler looked into America and gave us their broken king—Eric Killmonger, a Wakandan exiled into the American Experiment. He saw no legitimacy in TChalla’s rule and sought to return his nation to a primeval age untainted by Western influence. It is as Killmonger’s creators took the ashes from the riot’s fires and used it as ink and parchment. So much of Ryan Coogler’s and Michael B. Jordan’s work was, as with T’Challa, engaging and repudiating Killmonger’s creators. It was black personhood asserting itself against white creators, generally—and white supremacy, specifically.
Coates has a quote that animates my blogging:
“Any writer who takes as their starting place any doubt as to their own humanity, or the humanity of their subject, has already lost. The real questions, the questions in that writer’s heart, are never explored. And instead they are stuck answering the same set of questions that they’ve, long ago, resolved. For black writers, this is a formula for never evolving, for writing the same thing over and over.”
All of my questions revolve around the examination of black personhood. I left the Tavern Theater (great wings, generous wine) enthralled with T’Challa as a promising and untested Black Panther, and disappointed with my attraction to Killmonger’s allure; he was poison, yet the venom tasted sweet. Most importantly, I left wondering how the young man next to me had his personhood impacted by the struggles of black men and women on the multi-million dollar screen. He ultimately only saw the rare spectacle of black folk fighting over their destinies. He did not see what I saw—the everlasting reckoning black personhood must have with the white supremacy that shapes it.