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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   26070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.

Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.

The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.

There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.

We don't disagree on substance here - my spin would be that

  • There is no meaningful heterogeneity between film-Wakanda and film-rest of Africa because we don't see Africa outside Wakanda onscreen - it is represented memetically by scenes of Black America.
  • Wakanda is a collection of bad tropes of "darkest Africa" with a veneer of technological civilisation that the locals explicitly didn't build the hard way - the way the story is told implies that niggas who act like niggas could and did build technological civilisation if they had access to vibranium (memetically, if YT hadn't stolen Africa's natural resources). So culturally it is intended to be part of blob-Africa.

Wakanda's decision to start their outreach in the US was so egregiously bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. Even if you accept the assumptions of the universe, it isn't plausible.

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