Black Panther and Philosophy. Группа авторов
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doesn’t ask us to look backwards, but to do what we can to repair our moral relationships and our communities that have been hurt by historical and ongoing injustices. Admitting and apologizing for our role in wrongdoing and making amends matter because they do the work of relational repair. The key to reparative justice is communication between those who commit injustice and those who are hurt by it. Amends aren’t charity or compensation for what’s been lost. They work because of the “expressive burden”10 they carry: their ability to convey my regret, my acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and most of all, my recognition of those I hurt as full members of our shared moral community, as deserving of respect and consideration as anyone else.
And yet relational repair is not always achievable. Some victims are unable to forgive; some perpetrators fail to acknowledge or even realize their wrongdoings, and among those who do, some cannot bring themselves to apologize or do what’s needed to make amends. There’s no real sense that the British recognize their appropriation of African artifacts as wrong, so until they do, is it reasonable to ask Wakandans or other Africans to begin working toward relational repair? Or recall the last exchange between a defeated Killmonger and a victorious T’Challa, who carries his wounded cousin into the fading evening light.11 “Maybe we can still heal you,” T’Challa offers; maybe reconciliation is still possible. But Killmonger refuses. His self-respect and dignity won’t allow him to accept the bondage of incarceration – and his colonizer’s mentality won’t allow him to imagine anything else.
Though we’ve considered restitution, retribution, and reparation one by one, these responses to historical and ongoing injustices aren’t mutually exclusive. People and institutions often react to injustice with a mixture of these – or we might find ourselves reacting to injustice in a way that doesn’t include any of them or that ignores the need for corrective justice altogether. In Black Panther, T’Chaka, Killmonger, and Nakia offer radically different visions for Wakanda after injustice, visions for our hero – and for us – to reckon with.
T’Chaka’s Isolationism and Active Ignorance
T’Challa loved his father, but he never really knew him, and in his ignorance he was not alone. King T’Chaka kept nearly all Wakandans in the dark about what happened in Oakland and about the boy he left there. “We had to maintain the lie,” Zuri explains to an unconvinced T’Challa. Or as T’Chaka himself says of his decision to abandon his brother’s son, “He was the truth I chose to omit.”
This was his political philosophy and his epistemology, isolationism and ignorance as two sides of one coin. Whatever else he accomplished as king, T’Chaka produced what the historian of science Robert Proctor calls ignorance as an active construct12 : a kind of not-knowing, though not because life is short and there is just so much to know. With active ignorance, the not-knowing is the point. Sometimes we actively construct our own ignorance, but here T’Chaka is more like tobacco companies that worked for decades to manufacture public doubt about cigarettes, cancer, and addiction.13 He knows full well what he’s done, but thinks protecting his people means hiding the truth from them.
T’Chaka constructs public ignorance to uphold an isolationist vision for Wakanda. Think about W’Kabi’s advice to T’Challa on the question of aiding the world. “You let the refugees in, they bring their problems with them, and then Wakanda is like everywhere else.” Yet “their” problems are Wakanda’s problems too. The abandoned N’Jadaka is the truth T’Chaka chose to omit, a truth hidden from W’Kabi and other Wakandan isolationists – that “our” people are out there too. This is what the journalist Adam Serwer identifies as Black Panther’s central theme of Pan-Africanism: “a belief that no matter how distant black people’s lives and struggles are from each other, we are in a sense ‘cousins’ who bear a responsibility to help one another escape oppression.”14
Killmonger’s Imperialism and the Master’s Tools
Black Panther was a huge hit, with a $200 million opening weekend US box office on its way to staggering total grosses of $700 million domestically and $1.3 billion worldwide. And the hashtag that was trending on Twitter that spring? #KillmongerWasRight.
Killmonger wasn’t raised behind T’Chaka’s carefully constructed wall of ignorance. In many ways he knew more truth than anyone about Wakanda, about what it had done and what it could do to upend the world’s balance of power. Yet the danger of single-minded devotion to corrective justice as retribution is that it needs offenders to punish. Killmonger was able to give W’Kabi some level of satisfaction against Klaue, but what about his own claim of retribution against T’Chaka? The king who killed his brother and abandoned his nephew is gone, so who is left for Killmonger to serve justice to? “The world,” he answers, as the foundations of his claim to corrective justice erode and retribution becomes untethered from any legitimate or proportionate punishment. Killmonger’s vengeance is let loose.
Vengeance is not justice,15 but it’s not always easy to tell them apart. Perhaps no one knows this better than T’Challa, who emerges from the pain and loss of Civil War with this resolve. Having nearly killed Bucky Barnes, he tracks down the man truly responsible for his father’s death, Helmut Zemo, just as Zemo’s ultimate plan is nearly complete: he has turned Captain America and Iron Man against each other. “Vengeance has consumed you. It is consuming them. I am done letting it consume me.” T’Challa tells Zemo. “Justice will come soon enough.” It’s a hard-won lesson; if only he could share it with his long-lost cousin.
Deprived of his father and Wakandan community, N’Jadaka availed himself of the resources he did have and built himself into the mighty Killmonger we meet in the film. What resources? The Naval Academy, MIT, SEALs – “Killmonger is not a product of the ghetto,” Serwer explains, “so much as he is the product of the American military-industrial complex.”16 Many viewers see Killmonger as a damning depiction of Black American masculinity, for better or for worse. Indeed, the philosopher Christopher Lebron criticizes the film, saying that it “uplifts the African noble at the expense of the black American man.”17 Serwer sees that same tragic emptiness in Killmonger as Lebron does, but interprets this to the filmmakers’ credit rather than blame. “It renders a verdict on imperialism as a tool of black liberation,” Serwer argues, “to say that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.”18
Whatever else is going on, that last phrase is definitely on point: against poet Audre Lorde’s warning, Killmonger is confident he can use the master’s tools to do just that. He says as much when he becomes king (“I know how colonizers think. So we’re gonna use their own strategy against’em”) and in response to T’Challa (“I learn from my enemies, beat them at their own game”) in their final confrontation. His actions show this too. Orchestrating regime change in Wakanda, he follows his training, disrupting existing leadership structures and destroying the cultivated crop of Heart-Shaped Herb. As Agent Ross says, “He’s one of ours.”
Nakia, T’Challa, and Relational Repair
Killmonger insists on what T’Chaka wants to ignore, that the people within Wakanda’s borders exist in relation to the people outside them. And though Killmonger doesn’t make it to the end of the film, this vision of Wakanda in the world does. Recall T’Challa’s words to the United Nations (here’s one time when the post-credits sequence is absolutely essential):
Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We cannot. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we, as brothers and sisters on this Earth, should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth – more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.
Yet to think T’Challa only learned the lesson of Wakanda’s place in the world from Killmonger would overlook the fact that Nakia