Wakanda, the New Black Homeland

A fictional answer to whites’ real-world success.

James Baldwin, perhaps the most influential black literary figure of the last century, confessed in Notes of a Native Son that blacks feel alienated and inferior no matter where they travel in the modern world. Each black person, he mourned, is but a “stranger in their village,” a global village shaped by others—especially by whites.

He wrote:

"For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive." (Notes of a Native Son, p. 164)

Despite the rantings of Afrocentrists, Baldwin’s heartfelt confession is an honest analysis of the impact of race on world history, an assessment you will never hear from any person in power today, whether white or black. The uncomfortable truth is that the civilization created by whites that dominates the globe was built independently of black people.

But in today’s media culture, image is reality. Thus, the mainstream media is attempting to reverse Baldwin’s reflections on real world history via the fantasy land of Wakanda, and the massive marketing campaign for the new film Black Panther. Wakanda represents a spiritual homeland for blacks everywhere, a fantastical balm designed to soothe black self-esteem and emotionally support a people alienated from the world whites created.

Much more here