I watched Black Panther again with one of my kids. As happened the first time, I was struck by how much the scene where Killmonger vanquishes (but does not quite kill) T’Challa reminded me of half of Roman history.
When you listen to (or read: I listened to it) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is one succession struggle after another. And along the way were mighty warriors, some not of Roman extraction. There was one in particular I remember who was a giant, who was unstoppable on the battlefield, and who the Romans thought was their salvation. But soon enough, he turned tyrant, like nearly all the others. He may have died of old age, but most likely he was killed somewhere or other by his replacement. And on it went, for over a thousand years.
As so many have said, the value of studying history is that history does repeat itself. There is nothing new under the sun. Killmonger thinks his idea is unique, brilliant, all while he is articulating the very ideas which motivated the European colonial project, absent the “White Man’s Burden” which in theory at least placed some restraints on the use of power, and which in theory inserted notions of human rights and human dignity into places where endemic warfare and mutual enslavement were common. T’Challa rightly points this out to him, although I wonder how many really understood the problem.
For my part, I would like to see the teachers taking their kids to this movie to emphasize how fantastic Shuri is.
There is a lot of great mythic material in this movie, but to my mind the most potentially practically important is the notion that–granted time and space and freedom–blacks can equal or excel anyone in intellectual pursuits. There is no reason not to believe this. As I think I have pointed out somewhere or other, Africans are actually the most enthusiastic immigrant users of our system of graduate studies. They earn a LOT of Ph.D’s in STEM fields.
What have no value are the ideas that street thugs should rule the world–which is the basic Communist proposition (Can I call Killmonger a Sans-Culotte, noting that the most significant fact of his past is not his race but the class he was born into, and chose not to rise above, even when granted the opportunity by the very system he hates?)–or that violence is a good solution to any long term problem of consequence, particularly undirected mass violence.