This Folio Life: Walter Mosley on Black Panther

 

Written by award-winning author and commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet showcases one of Marvel’s most iconic Super Heroes. In this blog, Walter Mosley, one of the most respected novelists in America, explores this complex drama about T’Challa’s responsibilities as a hero and his obligations to his people.

Mr Coates is a thinker, a political philosopher, a man who rises from the modern age of America. His articles in The Atlantic and his books recast our world in a way we have often suspected but were never fully able to articulate. In short, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a comic nerd of the highest standing.

 

 

Mr Coates is a thinker, a political philosopher, a man who rises from the modern age of America. His articles in The Atlantic and his books recast our world in a way we have often suspected but were never fully able to articulate. In short, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a comic nerd of the highest standing.

He grew up reading comic books, considering their moral dilemmas, wondering if he were strong enough, brave enough, courageous enough to do what these heroes did. And believe me, Ta-Nehisi had to be strong. When he was six years old and going to elementary school in West Baltimore his teacher bade the class to rise to salute the flag. Obedient as a rule, Ta-Nehisi rose but he did not cross his heart, he did not utter the pledge.

When the teacher asked him why he was being so unpatriotic he replied, ‘My father told me that I can’t pledge myself to my enemy.’ Something like that. It was true. The Black Panther, Paul Coates, had told his son that he could not pledge himself to America, that America had not done right by their people.

 

 

It is not hyperbole to call Paul the Black Panther. He was the leader of the Baltimore Black Panther Party. On top of that, he and Ta-Nehisi went to the comic book store every week to find out what was possible.

Ta-Nehisi had run the gamut of the possibilities of the Black Panther, starting with his father and going all the way to T’Challa. When he read the comics he wondered how in the modern world an advanced civilization could be ruled by a monarchy. What if the
king were unfit? What if his progeny were not qualified to rule? What if the people simply did not want his blood as master?

These are simple questions. And, as we all know, the easiest questions are often the hardest to answer. And so in his five-year run of Black Panther, Mr Coates has tried to understand our love of tyranny contrasted with our desire for freedom; the betrayal of our hearts in spite of the love we feel for our blood.

 

 

So, Mr Coates’s journey in the Marvel Universe has been an internal one. It’s not Doctor Doom or the Red Skull we rage against but the complex desires that drive our humanity to the heights of sophistication and the depths of depravity.

In this world we face off against ourselves in hyperreality. We are the black slavers who sold our sisters and brothers to foreigners. We are the dictators jealously protecting our loot. We are the victims of a vile hatred that is older than our oldest member.

A Nation Under Our Feet is the distillation of fifty-five years of progress made by dozens of artists and writers finally coming down to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his compulsion to ask why.

It is, in part, the whole philosophy of Super Hero comics and its hold on the modern imagination.