By Teka Lark (October 16, 2018)
Black Panther was created by Stan Lee. He appropriated the Black Power (Lowndes County Freedom Fighting Organization) movement and drenched it in his US capitalist bullshit. Stan Lee’s politics are crap. He is a Democrat, but he is the neoliberal authoritarian brand of progressive, which is right wing anywhere but here.
He also pushes exceptionalism, you are different, but if you are magical, then it is OK.
Not all of us different people have magic.
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. You believe or think what ever you want, and representation is important.
Whoever you are, you want your kid to be a superhero? Go for it! You want to build that kind of lack of imagination in your child? Go for it.
And stop acting confused when boys are violent, even the “good” people in the US are violent. Dress your kid up like any violent superhero that you want, because sometimes you have to kill people, because they are bad. Who is bad? The people who the winners say are bad. Winners never lie. Native Americans sold their land and Africans, hey! we volunteered to come here.
I don’t like superhero comics. I don’t like “this is the bad guy and this is the good guy” comics. I don’t like games where someone MUST lose. I don’t like binaries, this Black and White nonsense. I don’t like it.
We want an anti bullying playground, but the US has a bullying culture. Where someone has to be on the bottom, because if someone else isn’t hurt or sad then how do we know we are winning, right?
The US also has a not so shockingly lack of vision.
This is not about everyone getting a participation trophy, this is about what kind of culture are we fostering, and from where I am sitting we are fostering a rather cruel and petty US and we are training out kids to admire tiny petty authoritarian dictators.
So what do I think about kids dressing up as Black Panther: is it appropriation? do you have to be a certain race? The answer to that is that you are asking the wrong question.
