18

WHY BLACK PANTHER MATTERS TO US ALL

Dave Verhaagen

“An entire generation of children will now know that a Black superhero, society, imagination, and power can exist right alongside Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, and Bruce Wayne. An entire generation of children will not know what it feels like to not see themselves reflected back on costume racks, coloring books or movie screens.”

—writer Tre Johnson1

“Today we are all the Black Panther!”

—T’Chalk²

In a rancorous and divisive time in our world, Black Panther rose up to become not only the biggest box office film of the year and one of its most critically acclaimed, but also an important cultural landmark. This was a movie about heroes of African origin who were courageous and ingenious and powerful. These were men and women who were proud Africans who fought selflessly to save the whole world.

So important was this film to those of African descent that a man named Frederick Joseph raised over $50,000 through GoFundMe to send the children of Harlem to see the movie in theaters. He challenged other communities to do the same, prompting 600 nationwide campaigns that raised nearly one million dollars for thousands of kids to see the movie. Donations rolled in from all 50 states and 50 countries around the world. “All children deserve to believe they can save the world, go on exciting adventures, or accomplish the impossible,” said Joseph.3

The film had a special importance for me as the adoptive dad of an African son. Daniel was born in West Africa during a gruesome civil war that landed him and his two sisters in an orphanage. His life in America was far safer, but adopting him allowed me to witness firsthand racial tensions and actions here that I never could have experienced before. It drove me to explore why people often behaved badly toward others who are different. The psychology of bias has some unexpected twists and turns. Those understandings provide us with some reasons why this cultural phenomenon of a film is important to us all.

WHY BLACK PANTHER MATTERS TO ME

My dad had just started his senior year at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, when administrators padlocked the doors and placed the school under police guard following a state order designed to fight integration. The school closed for the year, forcing around 10,000 White students to lose their senior year, all because the state didn’t want to admit 17 African-American kids years after Brown v. Board of Education had been decided.4 My father went to the shipyard to complete a GED and never earned his high school diploma.

Matters of race occupied much of my adult life, both professionally and personally. I spent the first five years of my career working in community mental health agencies that served mostly African-American teenagers. Most of my clients during those years were of African descent, as were most my co-workers.

Race also took center stage in my personal life. After my wife Ellen’s diagnosis with ovarian cancer, we built our family through adoption, first with a White kid, then a Hispanic girl born to a Guatemalan woman in Virginia. Years later, long after we thought our family was complete, we learned of a brother and sister living in an orphanage in Liberia, West Africa, who wanted to be adopted by a family in Charlotte near their biological sister. We read their profiles, talked to people who knew them, received letters from them, and spoke with them by phone. We fell in love with these two kids. The four of us (my wife and I and our two original children) decided as a family to adopt these siblings.

Within adoption circles, there is considerable debate about White families adopting children of color, and of families in wealthy countries adopting children from third world countries. The arguments are more complex and nuanced than I’d realized. While I sympathize with the perspective that pulling children out of developing nations is not always the best way to serve those countries, we were not just adopting orphans from a poor country; we were adopting these two particular children. I’d argue we were all meant to be together. And whether you’d agree with this, the fact is we were—and are—permanently together.

As his new dad and advocate, I saw firsthand how Daniel, the boy we adopted from Liberia, was viewed with suspicion and rarely given the benefit of the doubt. More so than his biological sister, Daniel made people uneasy, despite his easy smile and gentle manner. I was present when he was followed by the manager in a drugstore, denied a membership in a rec center, and asked to leave the grounds of an apartment complex for no other reason than his presence made people grilling hamburgers feel uncomfortable. And these are only the experiences I witnessed. No doubt he has experienced dozens more.

One night around midnight, he got pulled over for a DWB (Driving While Black) outside of my house just outside of Nashville. He and a friend had driven over 450 miles to stay with us during their spring break, yet he got pulled over a few feet from his final destination. I saw the blue lights and peeked out the window to see a cop shining his flashlight into Daniel’s eyes. I threw on my shoes and sprinted outside.

The officer asked who I was and looked surprised by my answer: “I’m his father.”

His eyes narrowed. He explained that he pulled my son over because one of his taillights was out. The only problem was there was no missing taillight. When I pointed that out, he changed his story, claiming he pulled him over because Daniel slowed down as the officer followed him, which provided probable cause. (Doesn’t everyone slow down when they see police following them?)

In the end, the officers conferred and let Daniel go with a written warning that read, “WARNING: Lights required—motor vehicles.” Notice it didn’t say the car had a missing light but only that lights were required, as if the police were pulling over random people to alert them they needed to have lights on their cars.

As of this writing, Daniel has never broken the law, never been a behavior problem at home, and never gotten in trouble at school (except for the time he clobbered a kid who called him the n-word and took a swing at him). Yet he’s faced many more indignities before age 25 than I ever have at more than twice his age.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence or bad timing when the store clerk greets every White person who comes into the store, but looks down and says nothing when Daniel comes in the door. Maybe it’s an oversight when the two tables that got seated after us get waited on before Daniel and I do. Maybe it’s bad timing when no one ever comes to help Daniel while he’s waited patiently for over 15 minutes to try on a pair of shoes in a sporting goods store. Maybe. But I doubt it.

I seem to observe it more than he does, but maybe he’s seeing it all and just keeping silent. After years of such subtle mistreatment, maybe he’s learned to keep it in. He remains unswervingly polite.

Imagine coming from a war-torn country where you’ve been shot at, seen a relative hit with a grenade, watched your father die, faced near starvation, and suffered a thousand other hardships, only to be treated with suspicion and derision in America. Yet he is a remarkably resilient person, letting all the slights and injustices roll off him much better than I ever could.

Into that reality comes Black Panther, a magnificent story of an African prince who is also a superhero. Many readers throughout the world had known this story for several decades,5 but films turned it into a worldwide phenomenon.⁶ For a young Black man like Daniel—and his White dad—it’s a story that matters. Watching an African superhero command the big screen with dignity and courage and strength mattered a great deal. T’Challa was the hero we needed. He is also a hero who echoes and amplifies the real-life Black heroes who walk among us.

One of those heroes is Congressman John Lewis, a central figure of the civil rights movement, beginning at only age 20, when he became a leader of the sit-ins in Nashville, the city I now call home. He’d suffered a brutal beating during the Selma march and had been thrown in prison at least 24 times. He knows what it means to sacrifice. John Lewis embodies courage. He and Andrew Aydin wrote a graphic novel memoir trilogy called March, chronicling Lewis’s life and struggles for equality.7 This became the first graphic novel to win the National Book Award.⁸

Another of my heroes was the unlikely president of Liberia, the West African country that was the birthplace of Daniel and his sister, Maddie. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was a major force in the women’s movement that turned the tide in the bloody and hellish Liberian Civil War. Along the way, she was imprisoned more than once and even given a 10-year sentence, before being pardoned following the international outcry.

In 2009, I attended an invitation-only movie screening of a documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell⁹ in Charlotte, NC. The film depicted how the women of Liberia had banded together to use nonviolent protests to force peace talks that eventually ended the horrifying conflict that took a quarter of a million lives. The organizers told us there might be a special guest at the end of the screening. As the lights came up, Secret Service agents entered the theater and took their positions. They advised us to stay in our seats.

After a few minutes, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf entered the room to tremendous applause. Even then, as the first female president of an African country, she was a legendary figure. She was a Harvard-educated economist, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and one of Forbes’s top 100 most powerful women in the world.

After she spoke about the hardships Liberia had faced in the past and the challenges it faced in the future, she took questions, I asked what the state of mental health services in Liberia since the war was like. She answered, “We have a very traumatized country, and we do not have adequate services to deal with all of it. If you would like to come help us, I personally invite you to come.”10

The following year, I was on a plane to Monrovia, the nation’s capital, to meet with leaders from the national medical center there. The hospital, named after JFK, was occupied by rebel soldiers during the civil war and used as a machine gun nest overlooking a major thoroughfare. It had taken substantial damage during the battles and had only been renovated the year I arrived.

As the head of the hospital, her staff, and the special assistant to the president gathered around my iPad, I laid out a proposal for increasing access to mental health services in the form of talks for parents held in local churches. They were enthusiastic about the initiative.

Later that week, I ventured into the bush toward an orphanage, down dirt roads and past massive mud holes that could have submerged our jeep. During the war, this refuge had sponsored the Liberian Boys Choir, a fund-raising effort that allowed some of the boys to leave the war-torn country for periods of time.

During the height of the civil conflict, the boys were performing at a church in North Carolina when they learned that rebel soldiers had overrun their orphanage. They had nowhere to live if they returned to Liberia, so several families in the Charlotte area adopted over a dozen of the boys, creating a true Liberian community around the city. Over time, the community grew, spawning three Liberian restaurants, two Liberian churches, and several other African businesses.

Now, years after the war, the orphanage had been reclaimed and rebuilt, with a wall built around it to keep thieves from looting it as they had for years. Even after the conflict had ceased, the head of the orphanage, an older but powerfully built man, suffered a scar across his palm from a machete strike, having confronted a band of rogues who were robbing the food storehouse. Wielding a metal rod, he single-handedly ran the entire mob off, like an African Daredevil.

When I arrived at the children’s village, the kids swarmed me, grabbing my hand, pinching my skin with fascination, yelling out their names so I might remember them. Tears came to my eyes, not only because these little kids were so starved for affection, but because my own African children had lived in that same orphanage.

An experience like that changes you. Africa and its people burrow under your skin and wrap around your heart. When you are touched so deeply, you want nothing more than to see the children of Africa—wherever they now live—to be richly blessed, to feel dignity and respect, and to experience love and acceptance.

So when Black Panther arrived and I could watch it with my children, it was much more than another Marvel superhero movie. It was an aspirational vision of Africa with dark-skinned Africans who were scientists and superheroes who moved with grace and acted with valor. It was a story that mattered.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PREJUDICE

“Y’all sitting up here all comfortable. Must feel good. Meanwhile, there’s about two billion people all over the world that look like us, but their lives are a lot harder.”

—Erik Killmonger to Wakandans11

Two months after the release of Black Panther, a 14-year-old African-American boy named Brennan Walker woke up late and missed his bus in Rochester Hills, Michigan, so he started the 90-minute walk to school. His mom had taken his phone away as a punishment, so when he got lost along the way, he couldn’t call for help. He approached a house and knocked on the front door for directions.¹²

“I knocked on the lady’s door,” Brennan said later, “then she started yelling at me and she was like, ‘Why are you trying to break into my house?’ I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High.” That’s when the situation went off the rails. “She kept yelling at me, then the guy came downstairs and he grabbed the gun. I saw it and started to run and that’s when I heard the gunshot.”

Home security footage showed the woman’s husband, a 53-year-old White man, aim and fire a 12-gauge shotgun at Brennan as he fled, missing him. The young boy hid and broke down in tears. Later he said, “I’m happy that I didn’t become a statistic.”

In the month before I wrote this chapter, I collected at least one story every day of Black men and women being subjected to mistreatment, often with the incident captured on video. Even when Black men were acting heroically, the results have been heart-wrenchingly tragic. Jemel Roberson was a 26-year-old security guard working at a nightclub in the Chicago suburbs when a fight broke out and someone fired shots. He subdued the suspect, but when police arrived, an officer shot and killed Roberson. A similar incident happened in an Alabama mall a week later when 21-year-old E.J. Bradford was shot three times from behind by an off-duty police officer. The autopsy concluded the cause of death was “homicide.”13

Black Panther comic book writer¹⁴ Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his own teenage son, “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, White privilege, even White supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”¹⁵

Racism is perhaps our ugliest, most tenacious sin. At times, it hides in the underbelly of our culture; at other times, it is on vivid display, as we’ve seen in Charlottesville and in many recorded incidents since then. To be clear, I don’t know the hearts of the Starbucks manager, the homeowner who fired at the kid, or the cops who shot the young adults. Perhaps some of them are overtly racist, but perhaps not. Still, the outcome is the same, ranging from humiliating to scary to deadly. Someone need not be an avowed racist or White supremacist to commit acts of injustice, but it does beg the question of why.

Psychology provides us with some answers.

Social scientist Margaret Hagerman spent two years doing in-depth interviews with White children and their families for her book, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America.16 She found that kids learn about race and racism not just from overt conversations with their parents, but from the decisions their parents make about where they live, who gets invited to picnics, what schools they choose for their children, when they lock their doors, what media they consume, how they respond to racist comments and jokes, and other, seemingly invisible choices. Even if the parents are not expressing overtly racist attitudes—and even if they are outspoken in their support of minorities—these small decisions have a big impact on their children’s attitudes toward race and racism.¹⁷ These children grow up to be adults who have internalized all the subtle but powerful racial messages of their youth.

This early priming allows negative media portrayals of Black men to reinforce these unconscious associations, which has awful real-life consequences. One review of the research literature found that negative mass media portrayals were strongly linked to more health problems and lower life expectancy among Black men.¹⁸ Another study concluded that negative media portrayals of Black men affected how police treated them. Dr. Pamela Valera, one of the authors, said, “Unarmed Black Americans are five times more likely to be shot and killed by police than unarmed White Americans. We believe that media may play a significant role in these disproportionate deaths.”19

In another study, researchers rapidly flashed two images to 64 college students, telling them to ignore the first picture, which was the face of either a Black or White child. The second image showed either a gun or a baby toy. They then asked the students to identify the object. Researchers found that study participants more quickly identified the second picture correctly as a gun if they had also seen a picture of a Black boy. And here’s the kicker: They also inaccurately identified the picture of the toy as a gun if they had previously seen the picture of the Black boy. Two follow-up tests found that participants associated Black faces with guns and White faces with nonthreatening objects, no matter the age of the person in the picture. For their fourth trial, the researchers found that participants were more likely to associate scary words, such as violent, hostile, and dangerous, with Black boys than with White boys.²⁰

Besides the subtle (or, for some, not-so-subtle) messages about race that we receive from our families, coupled with the negative portrayals of Black men in the media, there may also be a seemingly benign trait in humans that contributes to racist behavior. To illustrate, let’s do a very basic experiment. Look at this row of shapes and rate how uncomfortable it makes you from 1 (not uncomfortable) to 10 (extremely uncomfortable):

Now, look at the next row of shapes and rate how uncomfortable it makes you from 1 (not uncomfortable) to 10 (extremely uncomfortable):

Was there any increase in your level of discomfort from the first row to the second row? For some people, there might not be the slightest increase, but for many others, there may be anywhere from a little more discomfort to a lot more discomfort.

Why? And how does this relate to racism and social prejudice?

One recent study, conducted by researchers at Yale, provides a surprising insight: People crave patterns and they become uneasy when those patterns are broken. Our brains seek familiarity. From an early age, it’s how we learn and make sense of the world. These patterns also help us feel safe. The week I wrote this chapter, one of my clients, a college student at a major university, lamented the stress of going from high school to college. He said, “I used to know everyone and know how everything worked. Now I don’t know and it’s really stressful.” Familiar patterns create safety and security. However, when the pattern is broken, it can create a sense of unease and insecurity.

For their study, the researchers showed people a series of geometric shapes, like our row of triangles, then another with one triangle out of line. Researchers measured how much the disrupted pattern bothered the participants. What they found might surprise you. Those who scored high on discomfort for the broken patterns also had greater dislike of people who were different, including people of different races.21 So if someone looks or behaves differently than the norm, a prejudice against that person begins to take root. The individual may not even be fully aware of his or her forming prejudice, nor might he or she hold blatantly racist beliefs.

This in no way lets people off the hook for racist actions, nor does it mitigate the harm done, but it provides insight as to why people behave as they do. Because the study is correlational—showing a relationship between the two factors of discomfort with broken patterns and prejudice toward people who are different—and not causal, we can’t yet prove that dislike for broken patterns is at the root of prejudice, but it is a compelling step forward.

To change our automatic reactions to those who are different, we require exposure to stories and connections with individuals who are different. An extensive review of the research literature found that public perception of Black men creates barriers and causes many injustices. The authors write, “Among the most important mechanisms for maintaining (or changing) these perceptions are the mass media with their significant power to shape popular ideas and attitudes.”22

Mass media, including film, television, and even comics, has the power to refashion our unconscious attitudes and automatic reactions to people who are different from us. When I asked Anton Gollwitzer, the lead researcher for the broken pattern study, about the potential impact of Black Panther, he said, “When you are watching the movie and you see so many Black actors, the pattern is Black actors, so they are no longer seen as the outliers. Now they are the pattern.”

“Black Panther is a Hollywood movie, and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But … they must also function as a place for multiple generations of Black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations.”

—writer Carvell Wallace²³

WHY BLACK PANTHER MATTERS TO US

This is why Black Panther matters to us. It creates a new pattern, it upends the unconscious biases, and it makes the vision of heroic and ingenious Black men and women seem familiar and true. It succeeds beautifully at creating a new schema for us, one where we expect to see heroic Black men and brilliant Black women.

At first, breaking a pattern stirs discomfort, but often it is the necessary step to creating a better model. Black Panther is arguably the first international blockbuster to challenge the old pattern lodged in our brains. Rolling Stone writer Tre Johnson reflects on the title character: “He’s not being played for laughs. He’s not a sidekick or born out of dire circumstances. His story, one of an ingrained birthright, legacy and royalty is a stark difference for how we tend to treat most Black superheroes—and Black superhero movies.”24 Black Panther breaks the pattern and replaces it with something better, something more dignified and noble.

Though some segments of the public grumble and complain, the positive response to the film has far overshadowed the hatred. As one of the top-10 grossing films of all time, the movie is a powerful trailblazer that helps us experience Black men as courageous and not scary—and Black women as shrewd and not easily dismissed. The film has made its mark. A new pattern, one with a worldwide audience, has begun.

When I asked Daniel what he thought of the movie, he said, “It made me proud.” During our 30-minute conversation, he used the word proud no less than a dozen times. That Black Panther makes a young Black man proud of himself and his heritage should make this film matter to us all.

I asked Daniel what stood out to him about the movie. “It was a movie about Africa,” he said. He’s right. This superhero film is, at its heart, a story of Africa. Even though Wakanda is fictional, the culture of Africa with its rich heritage—the dress, the rituals, the community, the beauty—was all there, he explained. “I’d never seen Africans who were superheroes in a big movie before,” he said. And then it hit me: We’ve seen Black superheroes in film before—Blade, Storm, Nick Fury, Luke Cage, War Machine, Falcon, and others—but we hadn’t seen an African superhero. Black Panther celebrates Africa itself. Writing for the Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor goes further: “As an idealized homeland, Wakanda also represents the powerful promise of Black liberation dreamed by generations of African Americans.”²⁵ In his New York Times Magazine essay, Carvell Wallace wrote, “Never mind that most of us had never been to Africa. The point was not verisimilitude or a precise accounting of Africa’s reality. It was the envisioning of a free self.”26

Black Panther gives my Black son a superhero who looks like him and reveals an aspirational vision of Africa that makes him proud. It matters to us all because our children have a new vision of Black men and women as heroes—courageous, sacrificial, tenacious heroes. Michelle Obama tweeted to the Black Panther team, “Because of you, young people will finally see superheroes that look like them on the big screen.”²⁷

As a psychologist, I’ve seen the profoundly negative impact prejudice and racism has had on young men and women of color. As the father of two children of Africa who are now citizens of the United States, I’ve seen it even more up close and personal. But Black Panther has made a difference. It has made my son—and many other Black sons—proud of who they are and where they have come from. The film gives us a reason for optimism and an opportunity for us all to celebrate our common humanity. It is a movie that matters to me and to my son, and also one that matters to us all.

Dave and Daniel during the writing of this chapter.

NOTES

1. Johnson (2017).

2. Black Panther #40 (2008).

3. GoFundMe (2018).

4. Brewbaker (1960); Watson (2008).

5. Since Fantastic Four #52–53 (1966).

6. Captain America: Civil War (2016 motion picture); Black Panther (2018 motion picture).

7. Starting with March: Book One (2013).

8. Cavna (2016).

9. Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008 documentary motion picture).

10. Personal communication (2009, April 18).

11. Black Panther (2018 motion picture).

12. Jones et al. (2018); Madani & Romero (2018).

13. Roberts (2018).

14. Beginning with Black Panther #1 (2016).

15. Coates (2015), p. 10.

16. Hagerman (2018).

17. Hagerman (2018).

18. Entman (2006).

19. Oshiro & Valera (2018).

20. Todd et al. (2016).

21. Gollwitzer et al. (2017).

22. Opportunity Agenda (2011), p. 13.

23. Wallace (2018).

24. Johnson (2017).

25. Tharoor (2018).

26. Wallace (2018).

27. Obama (2018).