I'm now seeing Wakanda forever three times.

There's a lot to absorb in terms of its story, visuals, music, and performances.

We've heard from director and co-writer Ryan Kugler and his cast and crew about all these things over the course of this podcast.

But after three viewings, I'm struck by something both more shallow and more profound.

Beauty.

White supremacy, the system which enabled the descendants of Europe to steal an outsized portion of this world's labor and land has always been tied to a specious notion of beauty.

You see, a criminal power cannot merely exist. It must justify itself.

The natives are lazy and thus must be made to work.

The Africans are pagan and thus must be given the light

of our Lord and Savior. These little brown brothers aren't fit to govern themselves. It is the white

man's burden to save them. That each of these false flags serve to enrich the colonizer is,

we are told, merely a side effect. Other false flags are

rendered merely as adjectives. Lustful, warlike, stupid, ugly. These words are not furnished

as mere insults, but it sanctifies of pillage and plunder. Black people are nappy-headed, dark, big-lipped, and flat-nosed,

and thus deserve to be plundered of their labor, to be shot down in our streets, to die first in

our movies. And so what does it mean that Wakanda and Telecon give us a beauty created not to justify enslavement, but to celebrate freedom.

We should really take a moment to acknowledge that Winston Duke's Mbaku can be considered an object of beauty.

Only a generation ago, Hollywood would have seen him very differently.

And ditto for Akoye, Nakia, Namura, Atuma,

Ramanda, and our main characters,

Shuri, who takes on the mantle of the Black Panther,

and Namor, the feathered serpent god.

...