Omnium Gatherum #83: A Mule And 40 Acres Of My Own: On Wish Fulfillment, Wakanda Forever, Woman Tragic Yet Triumphant, and Man Absent

 Howdy, folks!

Welcome once again to the Omnium Gatherum.

This one is going to be a blast from the past in the sense that I don’t have any kind of notes or mind map arranging how this column is going to go. For me, this is back to the old days of this column where I just wrote some hot take and let the chips fall where they may.

And I resurrected the old banner title I used when I talked about issues of race in this space. I guess that means it’s time for old Papa Doc to put his Black Card on display (pay no attention to the demerits on the back of the card please!) and dive right into the latest mess happening in pop culture.

Speaking of messes, look at how Marvel Studios dropped the trailer for the long awaited sequel to Black Panther during Comic-Con Weekend. All eyes were eagerly awaiting this trailer, to see how the studio and production moved on after the passing of Chadwick Boseman, the gentleman who brought T’Challa, king of Wakanda and the masked hero known as Black Panther.

So far, depending on where one spends their time on the internets, the trailer was seen as worthy of the second coming or a hot mess.

The second coming folks don’t need me to explain their joy to anyone. Their respective social media feeds are already filled with reaction videos, joyful postings, and sharing galore of the trailer itself. Now, their joy doesn’t rival that seen amongst Black Social Media when the first movie was announced but, given the last couple of years, that’s not unexpected.

It’s about the other crowd I wish to speak. Perhaps to give their reactions a calmer, clearer voice. Perhaps to act as some prose version of the Obama Anger Translator concept, as introduced by Key and Peele. In fact, the impetus for this column jumping the line was one such post on social media by an old editor of this very column who found himself puzzled as to the response to the trailer by these others to the seeming lack of men and prominence of women.

The short answer is, I told y’all so.

Ever since that hazy period between the beginnings of Gamergate and the election of Donald Trump, I have been saying to folks via social media that all kinds of battle lines were being drawn by people that were going to make things increasingly more difficult moving forward. That all sorts of ideological conflicts were establishing themselves in the world’s collective psyches that would eventually need some sort of flashpoint or excuse to engage in open warfare and thereby resolve said conflicts. I would argue that the events during Summer 2020 led to one such curious flashpoint surrounding the death of George Floyd, where the stress of lockdowns due to When Corona-Chan Came To Town as well as growing frustrations over how the U. S. government was handling the situation found release in the peaceful protests and riots that followed. In the course of those events, some aspects of the various culture wars (what, you thought there was only one, my friends?!?) seemed to have won the day at last, as many arenas around the world seemed to use this moment to fully embrace the new civic religion based on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This embrace turned what had been a growing wave into a global tsunami, with diverse projects and voices of all sorts being pushed into the foreground, for all to see and celebrate. The election of Joe Biden as President seemed to have been the decisive victory over the forces of, well, Trump and White Supremacy, I suppose.

With Biden securely in the White House, the culture wars seemed to move from victory to victory, as more and more classic properties were given the DEI treatment and more new voices joined the ranks of pop culture. All should have been right with that world.

It wasn’t.

See, while those busybody types had been running around warning folks of ‘right wing indoctrination’ via YouTube and other websites, no one was paying much attention to a space that has come to be known as the Black Manosphere.

Now the Manosphere, for those who don’t know, is a loose term for those folks on the internets who talk about such wonderful topics as Men Going Their Own Way or MGTOW and being an involuntary celibate or Incel. As with most things in this age where diversity is supposed to be bringing folks together, this space ended up dividing fairly early on by race. Thus, the Black Manosphere. If the name of the space still doesn’t ring a bell with you, look up the name Kevin Samuels and much will be revealed. The late Mr. Samuels was a star amongst the Black Manosphere, primarily known for his hot takes on the dating troubles of the Black women who called into his podcast for advice. And often excoriation and derision on his part, for these women were calling in with perfectly framed problems for women dating in a post-feminist world only to find themselves dealing with a man who would roughly pull the blinders from their eyes about the reality of dating and relationships. I know women who loved Mr. Samuels for that compassionate violence towards their plights. I also know women and men who hated Mr. Samuels for that and for all kinds of other slights, et cetera, or for merely casting aspersions on women and feminism. Hated him enough to celebrate his passing when it occurred a few months.

Which is a very different attitude from the one on display earlier this week (July 25, 2022) when the Black Panther Wakanda Forever trailer dropped.

In that trailer, amongst other things, a fallen Black man was being celebrated with murals of Chadwick Boseman being seen on prominent display and a ritual of transition was being performed. All in all, the trailer itself was beautiful for this moment and rather businesslike in terms of getting on with the business of telling the next tale in the Black Panther franchise on the big screen. The show must go on, after all.

And perhaps that show could have go on perfectly fine, if not for those pesky men in the Black Manosphere.

See, one of the issues that both led to the creation of the Black Manosphere and continues to fuel it and its growth is the treatment of Black men in society.

Before I go any further, I want to pull back a bit and explain where I come into this situation. At this point in my life, my world is much smaller than it used to be while being much bigger as well. Taking care of a senior parent doesn’t necessarily occupy one’s whole life but it can feel like it does. Add to that my own personal habits and a few decisions I made, I’m not writing anywhere near what I used to when this column was a going concern at Comics Waiting Room. In some ways I had written myself out, having said most of what I wanted to say. In other ways, I couldn’t give up bad habits that kept me from taking advantage of some opportunities. Either way, my voice has been rather quiet for a long time. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t watching things that looked interesting. Whether it be Gamergate, Comicsgate, The Manosphere, and the like, I have been paying attention to some but not all of the interesting ways the internets are allowing humans to form all sorts of information ecologies and communities.

That, and given that I’m not a participant in the whole DEI push per se anyways. To me, diversity simply is and because of that trying to get both equity and inclusion to align with it is a fool’s errand. One can simply see this in how the first Black Panther movie was describe as being the most diverse movie Marvel had ever put out. See, in my day of just a few years ago, BP would have been called an all Black cast movie. It’s a description that makes sense as every part but two were played by Black actors. Yet that is considered diverse casting nowadays. Of course I’m being a bit facetious as there were a few Asian bit players in the first movie as well, maybe some of Hispanic or Latin origin. Hopefully my point is made though. 

For me, then, Black Panther was a cool movie to see, the next in the long line of Marvel movies building towards telling what has come to be called the Infinity Saga. Nothing more, nothing less.

That wasn’t how the movie was marketed to the larger Black community.

That wasn’t how the movie was received by the Black community.

That definitely wasn’t how the movie was received by the Black Manosphere.

To them, more so than the larger Black community, seeing Black Panther hit the big screen was a chance to see Black masculinity being celebrated. 

Now, I have referred to the first Panther movie as the Black Church Lady’s superhero movie because that was to whom most of the marketing had been aimed and how aspects of the story had been tailored. After all, while it’s nice to see Shuri working in a lab, most Black Panther fans know he’s as capable a scientist and inventor as Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Hank Pym. None of that was on display, in favor of showing off some of that Black Girl Magic one hears about so much on the internets. Okay, fine, one can’t have everything in their superhero movie, I imagine. After all, there was already one genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist in the MCU. What did they need a genius, billionaire, warrior king for? Especially when there were plenty of beautiful and terrifying warrior women running around Wakanda. And that regal queen mother, chewing up more than her fair share of landscape whenever she came on scene. All elements guaranteed to get those reluctant Black Church Ladies to come into the cinema and see this film, much the same way some of those same ladies looked so lost wandering into the theater to see X-Men 2 because of Halle Berry’s performance as Storm. 

Or to put into the realm of lived experience, as that’s today’s currency, when my own mother wanted to know more about Black Panther and asked if there were any history books about the character, I had to laugh to myself. I laughed to myself because my mother had never shown any interest in the character when I was reading the Jack Kirby Black Panther comics in front of her when I was a child. Not when I read the Priest run as an adult working at Comics Ink. But only once she had seen the movie was she interested in the character. An interest that died as soon as she tried to read one of the graphic novels I gave her to read. She wasn’t interested in the adventures, just the history, and the comics didn’t have the pageantry of the film. They didn’t have all of the women in featured parts.

Unlike the trailer for the second Black Panther movie.

Much to the chagrin of the Black Manosphere, amongst others.

See, as an observer of the various culture wars, I knew the moment I saw the opening shots of the trailer for Black Panther Wakanda Forever that the filmmakers had reached further into that Black Church Lady aesthetic and that those choices would send negative ripples throughout the Black Manosphere.

Why?

The short answer is, George Floyd.

What happened to Mr. Floyd was tragic, regardless of one’s politics. But his death became a political event, he became a martyr to the cause supported by groups like Black Lives Matter. He became something more and groups like Black Lives Matter rose in political and even economic power as a consequence.

A turn of events that many but not all Black men are familiar with.

See, for all the talk about diversity and the like, it seems that the dominant images of Black men in media still are as criminal and as martyr. Not as something heroic, other than in the sports realms. And definitely not as superheroic.

Until Black Panther.

(And yes, I’m skipping over Blade just like most folks tend to. For a time where all sorts of busybodies are concerning themselves with righting the wrongs of history, they sure do show signs of historical ignorance. I was trying to think of a Pepperidge Farms joke to insert here but nothing came to mind. I’ll leave it as an exercise for my Two Readers.)

For many of these men, seeing the hero from the four color and full color pages spring to life on the big screen was a dream come true, a dream that never dared to voice itself out of fear it would never come to pass.

For these men, they got a chance, no matter how reduced from his two dimensional glories, to see the Black Panther prowl the world at long last.

Only to see their hero turned into yet another martyr for Black women to mourn and to build something out of the remains.

No one in the Black Manosphere, as far as I have seen, has any negative words about the death of Chadwick Boseman. They may mourn him but the hero he played is still alive and well in the comics and in their hearts and minds. To them, there was no reason not to immediately recast the part and move forward with the franchise.

But the Black Church Ladies? Oh, no, they needed to mourn and mourn and mourn, as is their usual role in such things.

And so, instead of seeing a different face on a familiar hero, these men found themselves looking  at an all too familiar scene of murals and funereal celebrations and Black women being bucked up and encouraged to going on living and keeping on keeping on, as my grandfather used to say. Even the choice of music, the song “No Woman, No Cry” found itself being sung by a young woman instead of its composer Bob Marley. All of which effectively screamed out, “Hey, Black Church Ladies, we’ve heard you and we are going to make sure that we give you more of what you want out of this movie, that Black Woman Magic.” All while leaving the Black men who wanted to see the next Black Panther film simply wanting.

One of the issues that should have fully come to the attention of those concerned is the simple power of wish fulfillment. All the politics aside, stories, especially genre stories, are the places people go when Life has not only given them lemons but has pissed into the lemonade and made off with the money the lemonade stand tried to earn. For many but not all of these Black men, seeing the Black Panther on screen, larger than life even if reduced by the limitations and politics of Hollywood, had been a refuge for them.

A refuge that had been turned over to Black women, like so many other things these men see in society, lock, stock, and barrel.

Naturally, they’ve taken to the internets with their disappointment. And were we not in the midst of some many culture wars and economic woes and still dancing with Corona-Chan, they might not have been heard beyond the Black Manosphere.

Interestingly enough, it appears that these men are being heard.

Naturally, they are effectively being told to shut up and get with the program by Black women and Black male feminists and others. That Black Panther Wakanda Forever is the the diversity they’re going to get, damn it, and they had better learn to like it. After all, isn’t the 21st Century too advanced for any kind of He Man Woman Haters Club to still exist, right?

I would say that the very identity politics played by these folks is exactly why they now have to hear this voice, complaining about this film.

Because one cannot make any identity into a political act without all identities becoming political acts, period. Only a fool would think this wouldn’t happen.

I knew it would.

So while there are plenty of reaction videos of Black folks gushing over the Wakanda Forever trailer, there are some videos, like the one offered by Dr. T. Hasan Johnson on his YouTube channel, entitled “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever-Eating Off the Carcass of Dead Black Men” where both singularly and with other men participating the trailer was dissected and analyzed, as well as the group expressing their disappointment and frustration at seeing their hero taken from them so cruelly and casually.

Sure, one could argue that that isn’t the case. T’Challa still lives in the comics, old and new, for these men to read and whatever. And what’s wrong with Black Women being given the spotlight? Don’t they deserve it as much or more so than Black men?

If that’s your take after all of what I’ve written here, then I really can’t help you. If you don’t have eyes to see or more importantly are so myopic in your focus on the woman part of the diversity pie, then you should expect the enthusiasm for this next movie to be lower than it was in 2018.

Of course, I could be wrong. Black Panther Wakanda Forever could be another billion dollar film. Look at it this way, though, unlike the other entries in the billion dollar club, Black Panther is the only Marvel movie that made the majority of its money here in these United States. On top of that, the audience share for African Americans was 36% or three times their population proportion. The success of Black Panther came as a result of the enthusiasm of African Americans. A group that the trailer for the sequel just told half of to not even bother showing up. Unless they are going to support Black Woman Magic.

Who knows?

I have my bet though.

Until next time, folks.

Namaste, y’all!