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Is Black Panther actually insulting? A Chinese review

S.P.Requiem

S.P.Requiem

Location
Taiwan
Well I've not been on this forum for a while, but I read this Chinese review, and I think I need to discuss with some non-Chinese people, preferably African people, so I'm back.
And I know Black Panther was like a year ago, so sorry for that, but I only read this article today.
Anyway, when this guy put the story of Black Panther like this, I can't look at it the same way ever again.
Here's the original article (in Chinese): 大误 · 看完《黑豹》之后

Translation:
After I watched Black Panther, I felt weird and uncomfortable like having something stuck in my throat. Now I've thought through it: this movie lacks respect to real African people and its culture. Africa, in this movie, is just a superficial wow factor for the western audiences.

Let's imagine if Hollywood made a superhero movie called "Red Dragon".
It sets in the mysterious country in the far east, called the Ceramic Kingdom(I'll call it CK afterwards), during the 80s.
CK's GDP per capita is among the lowest in the world, it has no presence in international politics and no international trade.
But in reality, it has this magical element call Jinkela.

The secret of Jinkela lies within the royal family of CK. The princess is a genius scientist that can make all kinds of advanced technologies with Jinkela, like invisible fighter jets and maglev trains.
But despite having the world's most advanced tech, its politic, economics, military and culture is like a living fossil.
Their royal guards are a bunch of Shaolin monks using Jinkela-made katanas.
Their air force has fighters that use anti-gravity engine, laser cannons and EMP bombs, while their army are made of troops riding on fire breathing Kirins, holding snake-spears.
When the old king dies, their way of selecting the new king is to have all the princes gathered on an arena and fight. The last one who lives gets to be king.
The king has absolute legislature, executive and judiciary power, but also has to dress up as Red Dragon and patrol his land.
I have to say, if Red Dragon really existed, like the article's writer, I'd think it's a huge humiliation to Chinese people and culture.
Why don't black people think the same with Black Panther, is now what I can't wrap my head around with.
Not only that but they praised this movie like it's the greatest showing of African culture of all time. I've met many black people on Youtube comment section (at least they claimed to be) that are legitimately infuriated by any negative opinions about Wakanda, while I only want to smash Ceramic Kingdom to pieces.

So, what are your thoughts about this?
And if you're Indian, Arab, Japanese or whatever, what would you think if a movie like this was made about your ethnicity?
 
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Making Black Panther except everyone's fantasy Chinese completely ignores all the context behind Black Panther. The appeal of the movie can't be transferred to a "Ceramic Kingdom" for Chinese people. You gotta keep that in mind.

Also not gonna lie, it's probably because I'm a Chinese-Australian but a Ceramic Kingdom movie sounds wild because that means Hollywood has no choice but to give my Asian-American comrades actual movie roles and representation. And I'd probably have fun with fantasy not!China.
 
IMO it likely has to do with the fact that African culture has been largely destroyed, at least in the eyes of Western Audiences. Americans need degrees to have real knowledge of pre-colonial African culture, while, for your example, chinese culture is better represented, and many aspects of it are common knowledge. People don't know enough about pre-colonial south African culture to know it's racist.

There's also the low-key fact that actual Africans hate black panther, for your exact reasons. That's because it's not made for African audiences, but is instead made for African-American audiences. The point isn't to glorify African culture, the point is get some damn representation in the MCU, with glorifying what Americans think African culture is as a minor bonus.

Your CK example doesn't take this into account. Think of it instead as a film flanderizing Tibetan culture. It's just close enough that asian-americans can feel empowered by an Asian superhero, but about a culture so systematically destroyed that no one takes issue with how obviously racist it is.
 
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Tealg said:
IMO it likely has to do with the fact that African culture has been largely destroyed, at least in the eyes of Western Audiences. Americans need degrees to have real knowledge of pre-colonial African culture, while, for your example, chinese culture is better represented, and many aspects of it are common knowledge. People don't know enough about pre-colonial south African culture to know it's racist.

There's also the low-key fact that actual Africans hate black panther, for your exact reasons. That's because it's not made for African audiences, but is instead made for African-American audiences. The point isn't to glorify African culture, the point is get some damn representation in the MCU, with glorifying what Americans think African culture is as a minor bonus.

Your CK example doesn't take this into account. Think of it instead as a film flanderizing Tibetan culture. It's just close enough that asian-americans can feel empowered by an Asian superhero, but about a culture so systematically destroyed that no one takes issue with how obviously racist it is.
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That kind of IS the Chinese writer's point though - he's imagining the movie from the point of a Chinese person, not an asian-american.
 
Maybe, I don't know, posit the question to an actual black African? Who from what I understand were largely happy with just getting humanized
 
You couldn't possibly make a movie that glorifies "African" culture because "African" culture doesn't exist, and not in a weird racist asshole way, I mean there's so god damn MANY african cultures that you couldn't possibly represent them all in anything more than a token way no matter how hard you tried. The movie doesn't try, because that's not the point of the movie. It's not supposed to accurately reflect the cultures and histories of the african people, it's supposed to remind western audiences that africa is a real place that has humans just like you. Black Panther as a character has never BEEN about africans, he's meant to be a character for african americans to latch onto as a strong, dignified, intelligent character from a vibrant and powerful culture.

Also you know... this is the same franchise that has a guy named "Captain America" who is literally draped in the flag and who will happily talk your ear off about apple pie, baseball, and his exact and very strong opinions on the nature of liberty.
 
Tealg said:
There's also the low-key fact that actual Africans hate black panther, for your exact reasons.
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You are wildly out of touch. The film was literally selling out theaters across Africa.
Article:
The hype surrounding the film was palpable in Africa and that has translated into real profits for Marvel Studios' first black superhero. Five weeks after its release, it became the highest grossing film of all time in three regions, according to a statement from Disney on Tuesday (March 20).

Black Panther has grossed 77,6 million rand (just under $6.5 million) in South Africa and its neighboring countries, and another 102.4 million Kenyan shillings (just over $1 million) in cinemas in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. In Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia the film has hauled in 642,5 million naira ($1.77 million).
Those are wild numbers, low as they seem compared to ticket sales elsewhere in the world at first blush. In many circumstances pointing at ticket sales is meaningless argumentum ad populum, but Black Panther has achieved a real and sustained popularity across the wildly diverse countries that make up the continent. It didn't do so by being a fantasy that appealed only to U.S. African Americans.

The difference between Black Panther and a "Red Dragon" is the context of colonialism - one which the film lays out in its introduction - in Africa.
 
Is it actually insulting to Africans if it actually tackles the problems that the reviewer is criticizing it for?

Like, one of the core motivations of the villain in the movie is literally (as in, he says this), that he wants to end the country's isolation so he can violently free the African continent's bondage from other nations that have exploited it in the past and raise African peoples and their descendants out of poverty caused by systematic racism. "I killed our brothers and sister on this continent just so I could kill you!" are the exact words he uses. He constantly lambasts the Wakandan leadership for not doing more to stop colonialism and exploitation. The villain's father was motivated by the drug war and crack cocaine epidemic in the United States to subvert his country's isolationism and was killed for it because he defied his king and tried to kill him. Hell, one of Wakanda's most prominent abroad undercover operators begs her king to do more to help people affected by civil wars on the continent. The movie ends with Black Panther ending his country's isolationism in order to use their wealth and technology to improve the world's situation overall.

Sure, there's an argument to be made that it is "insulting" to Africa. There's an argument to be made that it's deliberately written to advocate for nonviolence and international cooperation (by making the villain so uncompromisingly awful) so that other audiences (especially first world audiences) don't feel uncomfortable watching it and can cheer for the heroes.

But I don't feel it glosses over the issues of colonialism and exploitation. One of the movie's first scenes is Killmonger visiting a museum exhibition of African cultural artifacts that have very clearly been stolen in previous decades and centuries, for example. I'm not African or Afro-minority in any way, shape, or form, but this doesn't seem "insulting" to me. In fact, its central themes tackle issues that never, ever get talked about in mainstream Hollywood movies, with the exception of terrible action blockbusters telling the stories of hardened US soldiers fighting awful genocidaires in some forgotten jungle somewhere.

Anybody remember that fucking awful Bruce Willis genocide porn vehicle from the early oughts? Tears of the Sun, I think it was called? Because I do. That shit was disrespectful. That movie would get ripped to shreds today. Black Panther is mild in comparison.
 
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I didn't feel offended by Black Panther, and while I distinctly perceived it as an African American take on Africa, it seemed mostly respectful. At least to my eyes, and I was born in Africa and lived there for 14 years. But I could also be biased since, comparing it to what goes on in France, where the diversity in the media sphere (only 10% of non-white people, 16% when we add American TV shows) is a disgrace considering the actual make up of the population, Hollywood seems sometimes a bastion of progressive thoughts. So I often give more leeway than is perhaps fair to American productions.

Something with exploitative or caricatural elements can be preferable to nothing.

Having said that, the review seems uncharitable, the fact that the movie tried to keep some balance between an optimistic picture of an African state having escaped colonization and preserved its traditions while progressing scientifically and technically, and the requirements of a comics book movie belonging to an existing continuity it had to fit in about a hidden/mystical kingdom of wonders, left it in a difficult place that it negotiated quite nicely.
 
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The comparison doesn't work because Chinese-Americans weren't enslaved and their culture wasn't systematically beaten out of them. Meanwhile and just as important for this comparison, their homeland was never fully colonized, and its currently either the 1st or 2nd biggest GDP in the world and one of the biggest success stories among developing nations, whereas Subsaharan Africa... isn't.

That said China was most definitely a victim of imperialism and Chinese-Americans were discriminated against. But the timing of it is different. If you wanted to have a China-oriented version of Black Panther, you'd have to set in the past (late 19th/early 20th century maybe?), when China was still a largely agrarian developing nation that got no respect and was terrorized by the West and Japan alike, when Chinese-Americans were busily being worked to death to build the railroad lines in the USA, etc etc. But even then I'm not sure if the comparison really works.
 
It's also ignoring the whole history of Afrofuturism in America. The entire point is that a Central African nation, which in the real world is poor, exploited, and underdeveloped, is in fact the most advanced country in the world. It's an aspirational hope centered around the idea of "What if they (meaning European imperialists/colonizers) never came?".

firefossil said:
The comparison doesn't work because Chinese-Americans weren't enslaved and their culture wasn't systematically beaten out of them. Meanwhile and just as important for this comparison, their homeland was never fully colonized, and its currently either the 1st or 2nd biggest GDP in the world and one of the biggest success stories among developing nations, whereas Subsaharan Africa... isn't.

That said China was most definitely a victim of imperialism and Chinese-Americans were discriminated against. But the timing of it is different. If you wanted to have a China-oriented version of Black Panther, you'd have to set in the past (late 19th/early 20th century maybe?), when China was still a largely agrarian developing nation that got no respect and was terrorized by the West and Japan alike, when Chinese-Americans were busily being worked to death to build the railroad lines in the USA, etc etc. But even then I'm not sure if the comparison really works.
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IMO there are some films that engage with that idea; I feel like there are plenty of martial arts films that involve Chinese heroes taking on English, American, or Japanese opponents and beating the shit out of them, symbolically striking back against imperialism.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
IMO there are some films that engage with that idea; I feel like there are plenty of martial arts films that involve Chinese heroes taking on English, American, or Japanese opponents and beating the shit out of them, symbolically striking back against imperialism.
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There are loads, yeah. The most famous example I guess would be Once Upon a Time in China. HK action film about Wong Fei-hung, railed pretty hard against Western treatment of China in the final days of the Qing dynasty. Also pretty cynical too, despite it being a heroic tale about Wong Fei-hung beating up American human traffickers. There's this one key scene near the end that's stuck in my mind since I watched it back when I was just a child: this one antagonist martial artist guy gets horribly killed by gunfire when he tries to take on the Americans, and he dies in Fei-hung's arms with his last words being about how their era is over and that there's really no way to stop the Western guns.
 
There's a lot I can say here, especially about endemic racism towards Africans and people of African descent in China, ideas of Chinese cultural superiority, and how it's ironic that a Chinese person is telling black people that they should be offended by Black Panther.
 
UnwrittenGuy said:
With black panther, it is the little details that wind me up. Like how they speak Xhosa, a laguage of South Africa, despite wakanda being located next to Uganda in the East. The fact that they didn't do such simple research, or did it and then ignored it, is disappointing.
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Wakanda's design in the films is supposed to take elements from all across Africa, not just a single place. You're literally being a pedant in the worst possible way to whine about deliberate Afrofuturist and Pan-Africanist design choices.

Given the design choices they made and the work shown in every other aspect of the film, no, it isn't that they 'didn't care' or didn't do the research. They clearly did the research and made their own reasonable design choices, based around the fact that the native language of King T'Chaka's actor is Xhosa.
 
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Nevermind that this fucking review frames the movie like it was made by white people, which for Black Panther is pretty goddamned far from the truth.
 
Fivemarks said:
Wakanda's design in the films is supposed to take elements from all across Africa, not just a single place. You're literally being a pedant in the worst possible way to whine about deliberate Afrofuturist and Pan-Africanist design choices.

Given the design choices they made and the work shown in every other aspect of the film, no, it isn't that they 'didn't care' or didn't do the research. They clearly did the research and made their own reasonable design choices, based around the fact that the native language of King T'Chaka's actor is Xhosa.
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True, for exemple there are clothes and gold and bronze working reminiscent of the crafting style of the Akan people from Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo in the movie. It's pretty clear that it was a design choice to refers to and honor many cultures of the continent. A clever one I think.
 
UnwrittenGuy said:
With black panther, it is the little details that wind me up. Like how they speak Xhosa, a laguage of South Africa, despite wakanda being located next to Uganda in the East. The fact that they didn't do such simple research, or did it and then ignored it, is disapointing.
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Africa is quite possibly the most multilingual continent in the world, with its many different people having their own languages, many individuals speaking several languages at a fluent level, creating mixed languages, and using well-known languages as lingua francas between different peoples that normally wouldn't be able to communicate. We also see in the movies that Wakandans can speak at the very least Xhosa, English, and (supposedly) the country's undercover agents speak the languages of the nations and people they need to infiltrate (e.g. Nakia speaking Korean).

It's not at all inconceivable that the tribes in Wakanda all speak their own languages and just use Xhosa and English as common languages to communicate with each other. Nevermind that if you wanted to realistically portray the multitude of Africa's languages (small reminder: Africa has something like two thousand different languages), the movie would be absolutely unintelligible to anybody watching. Choosing a genuine African language made sense. And they still had M'Baku speak Igbo and based the Wakandan script on a Nigerian language, alongside all the stylistic trappings, to make it clear that this wasn't just one African people representing the entire continent.

They compromised between representing as many of the peoples of Africa as they could and making a film that made sense and could be understood and enjoyed by many different people.
 
This article is getting the biggest side eye from me. There is nothing lazy about this movie production. Even a brief google will show you the research and care they put into depicting a variety of Africans cultures. It also feels like the author doesn't realize that many African and African Americans were involved, they phrase it as if it's a movie made by white people to cater to white people when the opposite is true. Have you also considered that it's kind of disrespectful to completely disregard something that has empowered a minority community? Like "how could you not realize how bad this is?" doesn't seem a bit condescending to you? Honestly there are reviews by black critics that are better able to articulate the impact of the film and I'd implore you to look for some.
 
Fernandel said:
Africa is quite possibly the most multilingual continent in the world, with its many different people having their own languages, many individuals speaking several languages at a fluent level, creating mixed languages, and using well-known languages as lingua francas between different peoples that normally wouldn't be able to communicate. We also see in the movies that Wakandans can speak at the very least Xhosa, English, and (supposedly) the country's undercover agents speak the languages of the nations and people they need to infiltrate (e.g. Nakia speaking Korean).

It's not at all inconceivable that the tribes in Wakanda all speak their own languages and just use Xhosa and English as common languages to communicate with each other. Nevermind that if you wanted to realistically portray the multitude of Africa's languages (small reminder: Africa has something like two thousand different languages), the movie would be absolutely unintelligible to anybody watching. Choosing a genuine African language made sense. And they still had M'Baku speak Igbo and based the Wakandan script on a Nigerian language, alongside all the stylistic trappings, to make it clear that this wasn't just one African people representing the entire continent.

They compromised between representing as many of the peoples of Africa as they could and making a film that made sense and could be understood and enjoyed by many different people.
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It's also, as @Fivemarks pointed out, a carry over from Captain America: Civil War. John Kani, the actor who played T'Chaka, is a well known South African actor who speaks English with a Xhosa-inflected accent, one which Chadwick Boseman adopted for T'Challa (makes sense, given that they're father and son). When they made Black Panther, the other actors followed Boseman's lead.
 
And again, Pan-Africanism is an actual ideology that has been put into actual institutional practice in the real world. Regardless of its effectiveness as an organization, the African Union has more members states than the EU.

Pan-Asianism isn't anywhere near as successful at the moment.

UnwrittenGuy said:
With black panther, it is the little details that wind me up. Like how they speak Xhosa, a laguage of South Africa, despite wakanda being located next to Uganda in the East. The fact that they didn't do such simple research, or did it and then ignored it, is disapointing.
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UnwrittenGuy said:
With black panther, it is the little details that wind me up. Like how they speak Xhosa, a laguage of South Africa, despite wakanda being located next to Uganda in the East. The fact that they didn't do such simple research, or did it and then ignored it, is disapointing.
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And how in the know where you before Black Panther came along?

Because there certainly are a lot of chumps out there who's idea of what an Africa is like begins and ends with stereotypes who are suddenly trying to act smart when one movie offers something beyond that.
 
Fernandel said:
And they still had M'Baku speak Igbo
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I did not notice that, so thank you for pointing it out.

Fivemarks said:
Wakanda's design in the films is supposed to take elements from all across Africa, not just a single place. You're literally being a pedant in the worst possible way to whine about deliberate Afrofuturist and Pan-Africanist design choices.
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No I am not, I simply found it disapointing from a worldbuilding perspective. It would be like creating a city next to New York and giveing people there a Texas accent. I know that building a consistent world is not the MCU highest priority and their choise to sacrfice worldbuilding for their art direction was probably the right choice for most of their target audiance. That dosen't change that I found said sacrfice disapointing, as I am some who valuse good worldbuilding in fiction.

Arthur Frayn said:
a carry over from Captain America: Civil War. John Kani, the actor who played T'Chaka, is a well known South African actor who speaks English with a Xhosa-inflected accent, one which Chadwick Boseman adopted for T'Challa (makes sense, given that they're father and son). When they made Black Panther, the other actors followed Boseman's lead.
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The obvious argument against this is that since they decided where to put the country they could have put it in a more fiting spot for the language but as I said before their choise to sacrfice worldbuilding for their art direction was probably the right choice for most of their target audiance.
 
UnwrittenGuy said:
The obvious argument against this is that since they decided where to put the country they could have put it in a more fiting spot for the language but as I said before their choise to sacrfice worldbuilding for their art direction was probably the right choice for most of their target audiance.
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You're making it sound like they did a bad thing.
 
UnwrittenGuy said:
The obvious argument against this is that since they decided where to put the country they could have put it in a more fiting spot for the language but as I said before their choise to sacrfice worldbuilding for their art direction was probably the right choice for most of their target audiance.
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Actually, considering that at least one language of Wakanda was established in a previous movie (as @Arthur Frayn pointed out), choosing to flip-flop between languages for Wakanda might have appeared inconsistent, might have led to a lacking suspension of disbelief for the audience, and would have been attacked on the grounds of insufficient or contrarian worldbuilding. They had to choose which inconsistency to follow, and following the characterization of two of the movie's key characters set in one of the world's largest crossover blockbusters made more sense than giving Wakanda languages that fit better geographically.

More seriously, my dude, this is completely pointless nitpicking. This is Cinema Sins-level of pointless nitpicking. Sometimes, artistic choices are just made, and they either work or they don't. The artistic choices in this movie work fine -- you're just disagreeing with them on principle here because the movie chose to have a graphic showing where Wakanda is located in the real world, meaning it had something you could look up. If it hadn't used that graphic, would you still complain about this problem? I personally doubt it. That's not stellar criticism.
 
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UnwrittenGuy said:
With black panther, it is the little details that wind me up. Like how they speak Xhosa, a laguage of South Africa, despite wakanda being located next to Uganda in the East. The fact that they didn't do such simple research, or did it and then ignored it, is disapointing.
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Like, we're already deep inside alt history territory with Black Panther in just the concept of Wakanda, so there is a bazillion ways to explain this but as a wholly fictional country and people there isn't any inaccuracy.

Like, I have to just underline that a few times here, because it's mixing up this and the issue of using the wrong culture or language for real peoples.
 
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