Birds of Western Ecuador: A Photographic Guide
Iain Campbell, Paul J. Greenfield, Sam Woods and Nick Athanas
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Western Ecuador is famed for its astonishingly diverse birdlife, from colorful hummingbirds and...
Genetic Improvement of Tropical Crops
Hugo Campos and Peter D.S. Caligari
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This book provides a fresh, updated perspective of the current status and perspectives in genetic...
Ross (3284 KP) rated College Dropout by Kanye West in Music
May 22, 2020
The Perennial Philosophy
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qAn inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the divine reality common to all faiths,...
Block Fortress: War
Games and Entertainment
App
Welcome to the Blockverse: an alternate and blocky dimension, home to a diverse collection of alien...
Coke Studio India
7.0
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"Coke Studio", an experiment in fusion music, is back with its fourth season! An "always on" format,...
Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Black Panther (2018) in Movies
Feb 17, 2018
I loved that the love interest was already established - there weren't any "falling in love butterflies" to distract from the plot. SO MANY STRONG WOMEN. All of T'Challa's support were strong, gorgeous women of color. His mother, his sister, his general, his love interest. The female guards. Absolutely fantastic.
The blending of technology and traditions was superbly done. People still tend crops and animals and tan hides and go to the marketplace in Wakanda - but they have vibranium armor and weapons, and technological wonders on their wrists that pop up virtual screens, and their medical care is the best in the world. Oh, and ships. Spaceships, basically.
THE CLOTHES. The dresses, the makeup, the armor, the weapons - the appearance of Wakanda was amazing.
And then the plot. The difference between "Well, we're Wakandan, and we look out for the Wakandan people" and "We should be looking out for ALL of our people (black people all over the world, not just Wakandans.)" That was where the real conflict arose in Black Panther - and it was interesting that the two leads, while opposing each other, actually felt the same about it. Just with different ideas of how to do so. (There's a lot to unpack about why they feel this way - some of it, I think, goes back to African-Americans having their nationalities forcibly stripped from them during the slave trade - so being black is the only thing white people left them with; while non-American Africans have their national identities to look to. So they might be Nigerian or Ethiopian instead of one unified black group. And the opposing lead was brought up in America.)
The differences between how the Wakandans viewed white people, and how the American prince viewed white people, are a very important conflict. You can watch the movie as just another superhero movie, and it'll be good. But watching it looking for the racial undertones makes it absolutely fantastic.
Also - the casting is diverse. Just because it's almost all black people doesn't mean it's not diverse. Again, that's a white American thing, looking at black people as one unified group. They're not. Also how many movies have been almost all white people with a token black guy? People complaining about "lack of diversity" in this movie need to take their white supremacist selves out of the theater and away from this amazing movie.