Who let the Black Panther out of the Bag!

Hi there! this is your ole pal Shagreene with my first post.

I know what your thinking, here comes one of the those libertards again wanting free crap again or complaining on how bad our president is doing. Well, this post is neither of those things. I want to take this post to tell why Ryan Coogler’s, “Black Panther” was so controversial both times I saw it.

Black and superhero don’t appear in the same sentence quite too often, so when you hear of a movie that has a predominantly black cast as well as a black director someone may say,  “who dropped ball” or is Tyler Perry here again. But to hear that Marvel is the one sponsoring the movie, is something . Well you can wax my bottom and call me a honeycrisp apple, (sorry produce clerk humor), I was ecstatic, stoked, and everything in-between. However, shortly thereafter, my facebook feed started to receive an influx of hate, discrimination, and a lot of things that you normally wouldn’t see from a Marvel movie. This is when I knew that this movie would be big.

 

African American History

Whenever black activists and civil rights leaders go to talking about what the African American plight is and how we were subjugated for so long, it tends to fall on deaf ears. Most people tend to think oh… here comes another black person asking for reparations or BLM. The whole movement in itself tends only reach minorities as a whole, but how much good can that do when minorities already know the conditions they live in. The main goal of activists and alike is to reach those 1 percenters. It is up to those who do have a voice and do have some power to influence those laws which affect the disenfranchised. That’s exactly what Marvel’s black panther did was use the platform superhero movies to put the spotlight on, activism, African American history, African culture, African history,  African technology, African beauty, and a slew of other ethnic facets that I may have missed. The point here is this, most people wouldn’t have watched this movie if it strictly talked about all of these things that Africans and African Americans were capable of or have gone throguh. For instance, in China you see blackface being portrayed as some sort of minstrel show, at expense of African ethnic dignity as a whole. Quite frankly, people don’t want to hear who was dehumanized, subjugated, or oppressed for hundreds of years; it puts everyone in a bad state of mind. It causes factions that divvies each of us in to ethnocentrism in the recesses of our minds.

Black Superhero movies

People like to point out that this wasn’t the first black superhero movie and for the most part they’re right. However; this was the first All black cast superhero movie. I can recall when I first saw Spawn with Michael Jai White and how shocking it was to me that this cool person had all these powers and he was African American. On another note, back in college I had taken a social stratification class dealing with successful children.Specifically, this study dealt with father and sons. Long story short, they studied so many sons and then compared the job of the father and based the success of the son on his father’s occupation and what was to be had was that the job of the father had 30% – 40% impact on the success of his sons. What does this have to do with anything? Psyche, your psyche will play a huge role in where you see yourself in the world. If you only see yourself in poverty-ridden flicks and in weeping-willy ghettos your psyche will sure be in flux.

Self-Worth

Generally speaking everyone has self worth issues that pervade throughout their respective communities and having a skin color is no excuse to say my depression or my mental health issues are more important than yours. So I want to speak from Terrence Greene’s experience as an American. I think I may have applied for well over 200 jobs with little to show for it. There comes a certain point when applying when you ask yourself, “am I worth it?” maybe I am meant to be poor or maybe I’m just stupid. It’s funny how even with a college degree I had these feelings.  It literally felt like I could barely get job at sonic if I wanted to. What followed after these feelings depression and rejection are feelings of zest and frustration. I literally had a better living overseas than I could have imagined here in Oklahoma. You start to feel worthless like minimum-wage fodder ready to replaced as soon as start to move up and qualify for health insurance. Why is this important? If there aren’t any positive images of your ethnicity prospering and thriving besides your rappers, your mindset turns volatile. At least I know mine did. So when I went to so this predominantly all black cast made up of 50 shades of African ethnicities It didn’t make me want to take up arms and overthrow caucasians like Erik Kilmonger or Nat Turner, but what it did instead was give me a euphoric sense of worth. It was as if my humanity had been restored just enough to keep feelings os suicide at bay. Despite being black, I am worth the time and investment of a superhero franchise.

Family

After a tumultuous relationship with my mother growing up through the years, it was a nice change of pace to actually go see movie with her, which I hadn’t done in quite sometime.