Brooke Obie

From Shadow and Act:

Disclaimer: This article contains serious spoilers about Marvel’s Black Panther.
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all the time.”

This is James Baldwin’s prolific quote about being Black in America and the sentiment that genius screenwriter and director Ryan Coogler tapped into when he wrote his version of the “villain” Erik Killmonger in Marvel’s latest blockbuster film Black Panther.

Michael B. Jordan put his whole foot into playing Killmonger, the man whose royal father was murdered by Killmonger’s uncle, T’Chaka, the king of Wakanda. (Seriously, give Jordan all the supporting actor awards.) Abandoned in Oakland as a kid with no father, Killmonger manages to survive and graduate from MIT.

But Killmonger’s “made it out the hood” story doesn’t include him climbing the corporate ladder and “giving back” with occasional charity donations and motivational speeches to youth about how, with hard work, they too can assimilate successfully. Instead, the former special ops soldier hatches a two birds-one stone plan of vengeance that punishes Wakanda for his father’s murder and empowers Black people throughout the Diaspora to fight back and win against their oppressors.

After T’Chaka’s assassination, Killmonger sees a window to go for the first time behind the invisible shields that hide Wakanda from the rest of the world. Seeking to dethrone his cousin, T’Challa, Killmonger plans to use vibranium, the resource that’s secretly made Wakanda the most technologically advanced nation in the world, to equip Black rebels with the weapons they need to destroy their enemies.

Yes, his desperation for revenge has twisted him into a man who loves to kill—hence the name—and who covers his entire body with self-inflicted battle scars for each person he’s ever murdered. And his constant state of rage manifests in bloody action. But it’s the root of his rage that Coogler so deftly explores in Black Panther.

Killmonger’s pain, abandonment and generational trauma touch on the rawest parts of being African American. Sure, the imprint of the continent our ancestors hailed from is embedded in our gums, but our AncestryDNA results don’t exactly lead us into the open arms of our ancestral cousins. We are a homeless people, not welcomed anywhere. If Wakanda is the Black Promised Land, then we are its forgotten children, sold away, left behind, rejected, condescended to.

Swirling in constant reminders of worthlessness, of the specific anti-Black-American toxicity experienced by Black folk in the U.S.A., Killmonger is angry—not just at white supremacist oppressors or systemic racism, but also the Black Elite who left him behind. And he has every right to want vengeance.

Read the rest on Shadow and Act.

Read all of Brooke’s ‘Black Panther’ pieces here.

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