I'm a lot older than the target audience, so I have the benefit of memory and context and comparison.
I value that so much because I don't allow myself to forget the world my father lived in, and the world of his father before that.
One of the things I'm learning about long life is that it teaches you huge respect for the power of change. It's because we begin to see not that change is possible, but that it's inevitable. For example, I enjoy freedoms now that in the time of my father were very controversial and would have severely limited any social, financial or political aspirations he might have had, and in my grandfather's time would have amounted to a death warrant.
I vote. And I loudly proclaim who I'm voting for, and why, and who I want to see defeated. That's two of those freedoms, at least. Death sentences, had my forebears insisted on exercising them. No need for judge or jury. Oh, and I live with a white woman. Add castration in front of that death sentence.
I would not have dared. I don't have the required courage - which is courage I believe I could only have found when the world forced it out of me.
Context affects the way a thing appears, and how it feels, how people react. And that context changes. Constantly and inevitably. And, like Global warming, it's something that we humans absolutely affect, but what can we, as individuals do to control it. Hard to trust in change. It doesn't come when we want, and it doesn't give us what it's supposed to.
Anyway, I was saying ... about Black Panther.
I'm glad enough to see it, but I harbor old, mixed feeling, too.
I was a Marvel comics reading 12 year old when the original Black Panther appeared. I probably didn't learn of him right away, just as I was also not immediately aware of the founding of the Black Panther Party. But I became familiar with, and a fan of, the real life Panthers awhile before I read about T'Challa, the fictional king of a fictional African country. I wasn't very impressed with the latter.
You see, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale, the founders of the real Black Panthers, dressed all in Black, too, but it was urban guerilla Black: berets and leather coats. And they patrolled the Black neighborhoods of Oakland, California toting pistols and shotguns. The were protecting their neighborhoods against police violence they proclaimed, in accordance with their rights under the second amendment. And they brandished law books too, and cited case law and the criminal code to patrol officers who were still learning about and ignoring Miranda rights, which were just coming into play, following a Supreme Court ruling.
The Black Panthers were real and they were bad-ass, a macho and invigorating alternative to Martin Luther King whose approach of militant but peaceful protest (letting yourself and your mama get beat up) had overtaxed the patience of many. I admired the Panthers, wore a free Bobby button and had a Huey Newton poster on my door. I fantasized about joining up.
I always believed - until just an hour ago, in fact - that the comic was named after the organization, that it was one of those lefty liberal, token gestures of solidarity. It seems so clear now that that would have been impossible. The Panthers were considered so radical by middle America that when they were literally exterminated - via street assassination, imprisonment, and the infiltration and dirty tricks of the FBI, the media and the courts barely batted an eye. Marvel comics on the other hand, was a business that catered to the imaginings and yearnings of adolescent nerds. But I always believed that the comic superhero was an unintentional trivializing and romanticizing of an important social movement. The Black Panther comic has always symbolized for me the softening of the wild 60's energy, the radical activism, the demand for change, that by 1973 had turned into disco glitter.
It turns out the Party and the Comic were formed entirely independently of one another, during that same summer of 1966 when the Miranda rulings were handed down, and that the identical naming was purely coincidental. Unless Huey or Bobby got the idea from the July '66 issue of Fantastic Four. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was formed two months later.
So now, because of the hype around this movie, and because I was motivated to air my dormant sense of injury about an old (but oh so contemporary) injustice, I was motivated to do a google search that corrected an erroneous belief I've carried all this time. I stand corrected, I guess. I will persist in wondering how much of our yearning for social justice, our anger at the havoc caused by greed and the lust for power, in drained off, quieted, sated or distracted by the overwhelming allure and catharsis of the Movies.
Sure ... see and celebrate this film, its mostly Black cast, and the if-only-it-were-so depiction of a proud, powerful, never conquered, and accomplished African nation. But let's not forget the real history, the context and the reality of what The Black Panthers were in America's tortured and limping walk toward Freedom.
I value that so much because I don't allow myself to forget the world my father lived in, and the world of his father before that.
One of the things I'm learning about long life is that it teaches you huge respect for the power of change. It's because we begin to see not that change is possible, but that it's inevitable. For example, I enjoy freedoms now that in the time of my father were very controversial and would have severely limited any social, financial or political aspirations he might have had, and in my grandfather's time would have amounted to a death warrant.
I vote. And I loudly proclaim who I'm voting for, and why, and who I want to see defeated. That's two of those freedoms, at least. Death sentences, had my forebears insisted on exercising them. No need for judge or jury. Oh, and I live with a white woman. Add castration in front of that death sentence.
I would not have dared. I don't have the required courage - which is courage I believe I could only have found when the world forced it out of me.
Context affects the way a thing appears, and how it feels, how people react. And that context changes. Constantly and inevitably. And, like Global warming, it's something that we humans absolutely affect, but what can we, as individuals do to control it. Hard to trust in change. It doesn't come when we want, and it doesn't give us what it's supposed to.
Anyway, I was saying ... about Black Panther.
I'm glad enough to see it, but I harbor old, mixed feeling, too.
I was a Marvel comics reading 12 year old when the original Black Panther appeared. I probably didn't learn of him right away, just as I was also not immediately aware of the founding of the Black Panther Party. But I became familiar with, and a fan of, the real life Panthers awhile before I read about T'Challa, the fictional king of a fictional African country. I wasn't very impressed with the latter.
You see, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale, the founders of the real Black Panthers, dressed all in Black, too, but it was urban guerilla Black: berets and leather coats. And they patrolled the Black neighborhoods of Oakland, California toting pistols and shotguns. The were protecting their neighborhoods against police violence they proclaimed, in accordance with their rights under the second amendment. And they brandished law books too, and cited case law and the criminal code to patrol officers who were still learning about and ignoring Miranda rights, which were just coming into play, following a Supreme Court ruling.
The Black Panthers were real and they were bad-ass, a macho and invigorating alternative to Martin Luther King whose approach of militant but peaceful protest (letting yourself and your mama get beat up) had overtaxed the patience of many. I admired the Panthers, wore a free Bobby button and had a Huey Newton poster on my door. I fantasized about joining up.
I always believed - until just an hour ago, in fact - that the comic was named after the organization, that it was one of those lefty liberal, token gestures of solidarity. It seems so clear now that that would have been impossible. The Panthers were considered so radical by middle America that when they were literally exterminated - via street assassination, imprisonment, and the infiltration and dirty tricks of the FBI, the media and the courts barely batted an eye. Marvel comics on the other hand, was a business that catered to the imaginings and yearnings of adolescent nerds. But I always believed that the comic superhero was an unintentional trivializing and romanticizing of an important social movement. The Black Panther comic has always symbolized for me the softening of the wild 60's energy, the radical activism, the demand for change, that by 1973 had turned into disco glitter.
It turns out the Party and the Comic were formed entirely independently of one another, during that same summer of 1966 when the Miranda rulings were handed down, and that the identical naming was purely coincidental. Unless Huey or Bobby got the idea from the July '66 issue of Fantastic Four. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was formed two months later.
So now, because of the hype around this movie, and because I was motivated to air my dormant sense of injury about an old (but oh so contemporary) injustice, I was motivated to do a google search that corrected an erroneous belief I've carried all this time. I stand corrected, I guess. I will persist in wondering how much of our yearning for social justice, our anger at the havoc caused by greed and the lust for power, in drained off, quieted, sated or distracted by the overwhelming allure and catharsis of the Movies.
Sure ... see and celebrate this film, its mostly Black cast, and the if-only-it-were-so depiction of a proud, powerful, never conquered, and accomplished African nation. But let's not forget the real history, the context and the reality of what The Black Panthers were in America's tortured and limping walk toward Freedom.
