A friend has repeatedly told me I need to “blacken up,” since my appreciation for Black Panther is, apparently, insufficient. Of course, he would also say my appreciation for lots of things is equally insufficient; religion, for example. In particularly, the relief or comfort religion provides to this country’s abused and neglected black population. I might imagine that I have plenty of sympathy and solidarity with my black, Hispanic, and other minority friends, but I’d probably be wrong. I’m white, educated, middle class, and live in Middle America where all of my privilege and entitlements are entrenched.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t always been those things. When I escaped my parents’ fundamentalist home, I went from middle class to desperately poor. Poor enough that I lived for part of a summer on the Arkansas River a few miles west of Dodge City in a log lean-to I’d built with my own hands, an axe, and a log saw I “borrowed” from a friend’s father. At the time, I wasn’t broke but I might as well been. My father was the primary owner of my “college savings” and he refused to let me spend it on anything else. To the point that the only way I could do anything with that money was to sign up for what turned out to be just another Texas for-profit “education’ scam. He promptly wrote a check with my money for 3,000 1967 dollars ($22,263.50 in 2018 money) to a “school” that was practically Trumpian it was so bogus. Another $500 of my money ($3,710.58 today) went to a flophouse the school called its “dormitory” and I was on my way from my river hideout to Dallas, Texas and real poverty. In no time, the school collapsed under its own incompetence and most of my school mates joined a class-action lawsuit they eventually won, which resulted in the school going bankrupt and evading responsibility for all but a small percentage of the money it had stolen from its victims. My father, on the other hand, sent the school the last of my savings when they asked for full payment for my “education,” another $4,000 ($29,684.67 in 2018 money). The end result was that I ended up moving to a one-room converted 1900’s garage in a scummy part of Old East Dallas. The place cost me $40/month (about $300 today), which was exactly 1/3 of my monthly income, 1/4 of my gross went to state and federal taxes, the rest went for food and transportation. I ate a lot of chicken, fatty pork, and peanut butter. My wife, Robbye, moved in with me a few months later. From there, I moved from one lousy apartment to another lousier house to more apartments until I saved enough money to get the hell out of Dallas. While we lived in Dallas, I was part of the anti-Vietnam War movement, identified as a “hippy” in a state that truly hated hippies, and was so far into the alternative culture that the majority of my own generation in Dallas would have been happy to see me dead or in jail. The next generation occasionally took actual potshots at me and my friends at every opportunity.
For the next ten years, we lived from paycheck to paycheck while I went to school nights, took engineering correspondence courses, and began a family. I’ve been poor enough that I often took those jobs Bush and Trump say “Americans don’t want.” I didn’t want them, either, but I needed to feed my family and beggars can’t be choosers. I didn’t make it into the middle class until I was just short of 50. I didn’t have squat for retirement savings until a few years later. So, while I may look, today, like a poster boy for my so-called entitled generation, you have no idea who you are talking to if you believe that. To get to here from there, I have had to pretend to be someone I am not for the majority of my adult life.
Back to Black Panther.
What left me cold in the movie was the bowing and scraping over Wakanda’s royalty. The whole idea of a king leaves me cold. Yes, I have little-to-no respect for the UK, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, etc. At the head of each of those countries lies a waste of air. The ease at which Wakanda’s Princess Shuri mastered “science” was one more false premise in the usual nonsensical Marvel world. The “happy folk” littered around the edges of Wakanda’s capitol city tending goats, walking beside their animals, weaving baskets, and other examples of the usual giant economic inequality demonstrated in monarchies didn’t impress me, either. Sorry. Whatever excuse you have for some people wearing rags and going barefoot while the royalty wear super-armored and weaponized suits isn’t going to do much for me; other than piss me off.
I feel the same way about black promoters of religion. Christianity has done NOTHING for black Americans; except take their money in huge quantities. Supposedly, there is “comfort” provided by the promise of a Big Rock Candy Mountain afterlife, but we all know that is just a shell game designed to distract suckers from what’s happening right now. And there are even uglier aspects of black Christianity that don’t have to be faced while the sales pitch is in full demonstration: racism, homophobia, income inequality, and the rest of the crap religion is designed to distract us from addressing and fixing.
You know religion isn’t helping when writers argume it’s a good thing that “Black People Aren't Inherently More Homophobic Than Anyone Else.” I’d be impressed if all minorities bound together to oppose their common enemy, but I’d be a drunken fool to expect anything like that from the deeply flawed human animal.
My Black Panther movie was probably V for Ventetta. The identifying moment for me came with the impossible event that the British military decided not to slaughter the general population as thousands of unarmed and Guy Fawkes masked Londoners march on Parliament. Every bit as impossibly idealistic as anything in Black Panther, I know. So sue me.
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