Wakanda Forever’s Message of Alliance to Black and Brown Folk

By Keith Rushing

When I went to see Wakanda Forever opening weekend, I expected to see a well-executed film, featuring beautiful and powerful Black people from all over the diaspora. I expected to hear African languages spoken, a virtually unheard of occurrence with the exception of the first Black Panther film. I knew traditional African aesthetics would be lifted up and I’d see great action scenes and suspense. Wakanda Forever delivered. (Spoilers head.)

But I didn’t expect that the film would be infused with issues of race, not only between white and Black people but also Black and indigenous people, which is representative of the conflict between Black and Latinx communities.  

Driving the action is the U.S. government, which is pressuring the Wakandans to sell the powerful vibranium against their wishes in an effort to control the resource. The indigenous people of Talokan who were forced underground after suffering enslavement, also possess vibranium and fear the U.S. government will seek to control it and threaten their survival as well.

Anyone with an awareness of 500 years of Western colonialism and global dominance should be able to see that writer-director Ryan Coogler’s fictional film is allegorical and offers a perspective about the racialized oppression we live with today.

For African Americans, that Western domination involves the extraction and plunder of Black bodies which built the wealth so many Americans take for granted today. For Africans from the continent it may evoke the ways in which European colonial powers divided the continent in the so-called Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century seeking to dominate their lands and extract their mineral wealth.

If your reaction was similar to mine you thought: “Yep, I’ve seen this story before.” In fact, this fictional narrative belies the essential truth of our collective past of racialized trauma. And this is true for those of us of indigenous African descent and indigenous descent in the Americas.

Wakanda Forever is the only film I’ve ever seen that not only recognizes African heritage and beauty but the underappreciated richness and beauty of indigenous civilization of the Americas in the same film.

Tenoch Huerta, who is Mexican, speaks Mayan in the film and plays the role of an indigenous superhero fighting to protect Talokan. Wakandans speak Xhosa, an indigenous African language spoken widely in South Africa.

Both the Wakandans and people of Talokan are battling white supremacy and domination and confront their own internal conflict, which is at its root, created by the U.S. government.

The film, as fictional as it is, reflects the lived reality of Indigenous peoples from North, Central and South American, who have faced everything from enslavement and land theft to cultural genocize and dehumanization. 

I couldn’t help but think about what this film says about our current day reality. African Americans and Mexican-Americans, have, and still do, contend with physical displacement, an ongoing assault of our cultures and languages of origin, dehumanization, white supremacy and racism. Both groups contend with colorism, which Huerta takes on in his personal life.

In recent years, some who are Latinx, raise the fact that they are the largest racial minority group in the U.S. and their contributions, economic power and political strength are undervalued and overlooked. The culprit is white racism.  

But the implication that Latinx are the largest minority could give the impression that African Americans who have been the largest minority group since the 19th century and have greater visibility and recognition in larger society, should perhaps receive less of the spotlight.

In fact, last year, New York Times opinion columnist Charles Blow pointed to research from the Pew Center indicating that a large percentage of Latinos--45 percent--think too much attention is devoted to Black people and race. Clearly, many think there’s too much focus on race in general.

The reality is that both Black and Latinx people face rampant discrimination and racial disparities from employment, to healthcare to racial profiling and overpolicing. We have lower levels of educational attainment and less wealth to pass down to future generations.  

Neither group, particularly those with brown skin, get to feel the security that whiteness provides in America. Black and Brown people are indeed more vulnerable.

When I look honestly at the situation, I do have a fear that the forces of white supremacy will always reserve a place at the bottom of society for Black people, the people who are the most different from White people physically with this fraught history of racial violence and resistance. 

That old saying among Black folks comes to mind:

If you’re Black get back, if you’re Brown stick around and if you’re white, you’re alright.

If we only advocate for our own group separately, we can more easily be pitted against each other. One group’s success in one area of life can be used as a yardstick to gauge progress but can also be weaponized to point out the other group’s failures.

We must avoid any zero-sum thinking that says one group's success could spell the other’s loss, especially as white supremacy rises in this country. We have to understand the commonalities of our oppression, share our heritage with one another, and keep telling the untold story of how we have survived. 

There are so many similarities in how Black and Brown people find joy and how we rely on culture and family ties to build resilience. In seeing each other and deepening our understanding, hopefully we will see greater value in showing up as allies to one another. After all, neither group created anti-blackness and anti-Brown hostility. The disease has the same culprit and we both suffer from it. 

Keith Rushing is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C.