Africans in America Must Be Encouraged to Return to Africa and Build Their "Dream State" of Wakanda

Africans in America almost unanimously believe Wakanda is an expression of what black people would have created had the continent been left undisturbed by European colonization and Africans allowed to evolve without the pernicious influence of the white man. [Why ‘Black Panther’ Is a Defining Moment for Black America: Ryan Coogler’s film is a vivid re-imagination of something black Americans have cherished for centuries — Africa as a dream of our wholeness, greatness and self-realization., New York Times, 2-12-2018]:

The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this. 

We must encourage Africans in America to return to Africa and begin constructing Wakanda (so far, giving them - via white flight - Detroit, Baltimore, Gary, Newark, Camden, Chicago, and Memphis have failed to produce a Wakandan-esque utopia...)

“Wakanda itself is a dream state,” says the director Ava DuVernay, “a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” She and Coogler have spent the past few months working across the hall from each other in the same editing facility, with him tending to “Black Panther” and her to her much-anticipated film of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” At the heart of Wakanda, she suggests, lie some of our most excruciating existential questions: “What if they didn’t come?” she asked me. “And what if they didn’t take us? What would that have been?”

A large percentage of the white population in the United States of America secretly wishes Wakanda was a real place, instead of a fictional African nation found in comic books (the invention of two Jewish dudes), because its existence would immediately disprove the assertion of racists in the USA who note the low quality of life found wherever Africans in America are located in large numbers. [‘Black Panther’ resonates during the Trump era, experts say, AM New York, 2-1-2018]:

The tense political and racial climate makes the film’s message about a non-colonized African nation even more important, [Fredrick Joseph] said. 

Wakanda, the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, is a direct rebuke to President Trump’s alleged disparaging remarks about some African nations.

But make no mistake, black intellectuals view Wakanda as the culmination of black greatness, denied by insidious white people. [Why Wakanda matters, Washington Post, 2-20-18]:

“Wakanda represents this unbroken chain of achievement of black excellence that never got interrupted by colonialism,” Evan Narcisse, a pop culture critic who co-writes “The Rise of the Black Panther” miniseries, told The Washington Post’s David Betancourt. 

And, as an idealized homeland, Wakanda also represents the powerful promise of black liberation dreamed by generations of African Americans. “We have for centuries sought to either find or create a promised land where we would be untroubled by the criminal horrors of our American existence,” Carvell Wallace wrote in the New York Times magazine. “From Paul Cuffee’s attempts in 1811 to repatriate blacks to Sierra Leone and Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa Black Star shipping line to the Afrocentric movements of the ’60s and ’70s, black people have populated the Africa of our imagination with our most yearning attempts at self-realization.” 

“Identity is not dead, as the incredibly identitarian Trump administration has made quite clear,” wrote my colleague Christine Emba, hailing the film as a “black triumph.” “Because of, and in spite of, an increasingly divided racial climate, the representation of people of color in broader spaces matters.”  

“We’re in a political moment where the president of the United States calls people from Haiti and Africa, he calls those countries ‘s---holes,’ ” Narcisse told The Post. “If you’re a young person hearing that … you need to see a superhero that’s smart, cunning and noble who also looks like you. Granted, it’s fiction, but superheroes have always had an aspirational aspect to them.” 

In the end, “Black Panther” delivers a pointed message of inclusion, a call to build “bridges” — not “walls” — to move beyond a past of violence and injustice. But, in Wakanda, there’s just one global superpower, resplendent and mighty, that needs no reference but itself.

Black intellectuals revel in Wakanda proving their theories of what Africans lost by being smothered in a white supremacist state and fulfilling their fantasies of seeing what Africans could have achieved were it not for the former. 

So let it be known I encourage all Africans in America to break from their racist oppressors ("colonizers" as a citizen of Wakanda dubs white people), shattering the bonds of systemic inequality, implicit bias, and white privilege by heading back to Africa to build Wakanda.

#WakandaIsntReal currently, but if the fictional African utopia is to be realized (where blacks can yell "Wakanda Forever" until their voices go hoarse), Africans in America must return to the motherland and begin construction of their "dream state."