Namor, the king of Talokan, a hidden Atlantis-style underwater civilization of Indigenous peoples, is a direct victim of colonization who has witnessed the enslavement of his people. He fears that Talokan might be discovered now that America and its allies are searching for vibranium. Will his people be at risk of exploitation and violence from white nations as a consequence of T’Challa’s decision to reveal Wakanda and its resources?
On one level the conflicts in these movies are insular: communities of color are set against one another, which is so much more real than an evil robot or a big purple dude snapping half the universe away. But in “Wakanda Forever,” although the big battle is between Wakanda and Talokan, the actual villains are the countries searching for vibranium in their bids for power. In an early scene at the United Nations, Queen Ramonda confronts diplomats demanding access to vibranium; their countries have sent undercover agents to raid Wakanda’s vibranium facilities, and have searched the ocean for other possible stores of vibranium, aiming to use the precious metal to further develop their weaponry.
In “Black Panther,” the film tosses us a red herring in the form of Ulysses Klaue, one of Black Panther’s main nemeses and the son of an actual Nazi in the original comics. Klaue is perfectly set up as the bad guy: he’s a criminal mastermind, a shady profiteer who sells weapons and artifacts, many from Wakanda. A more predictable film would have maintained him as the big bad guy and brought Killmonger in as a villainous sidekick — a Black man misled by anger, but still likely to redeem himself by the end. With his murder of Klaue, Killmonger may have supplanted him as the antagonist, but the reality is that the fountainhead for Killmonger’s fury and militant politics are society’s racial inequities, exploited by Klaue, Europeans and others who see Black people primarily as a means to building wealth, tracing all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
When Shuri is forced to confront Killmonger, which means confronting the part of her that’s angry and hurt and hardened by grief, the film implies that this is a common duality Black people embody today, that we must simultaneously hold our personal sense of dignity and righteousness, like a Wakandan royal, and our outrage and shame, like Killmonger. Does that make any one of us less than a hero? No, these films say, because in the end there’s still a Black Panther protecting the nation.
In these films, the true villain is a history of white oppression and power, but the enemy — whether another person of color or a Black person elsewhere in the diaspora — is on the same team.
