It’s the two year anniversary of the Black Panther film, and much remains the same. If you talk to ten people about Erik Killmonger, the (alleged) villain, you’ll walk away with a dozen opinions. Killmonger elicits from us what we’re already thinking about identity, race, and society. He does so whether these views inhabit the surface or the depths of our thoughts. In other words, Killmonger is a Rorschach Test!
I’m assuming readers have already seen Black Panther. And I’ll note right away that I’m discussing only the film, not the comics or any associated stories or media. If you haven’t seen the film, go watch it! If you have seen it, read on.
Five Theses on The Killmonger Rorschach Test
I don’t want to summarize the film. At least not in any depth. Instead, I’ll lay out the bare minimum on Killmonger. He’s a black man who grew up in Oakland in the early 1990s in the midst of both American racism in general and Oakland racism in particular. He discovered he was a forgotten son of the royal family of Wakanda, a fictional, technologically advanced black kingdom in Africa.
So, what’s so special about Killmonger?
1. The film tries, and fails, to turn him into a full villain.
Killmonger’s an unlikely hero, or at least a complicated villain, for lots of people. But it felt to me like the film tried as hard as possible not to present him this way. He mows down anyone in his way without remorse, including his apparent romantic partner. Whatever it is about him people found compelling is something they found compelling despite great effort on the filmmakers’ part. They set up T’Challa as the hero of this film, ending the film through T’Challa’s symbolic incorporation of whatever small kernel of goodness existed in Killmonger’s cause.
Lots of people weren’t having it.
2. The resolution of his character’s plot didn’t work for anyone.
Killmonger dies by choice. T’Challa defeats him in combat and could’ve easily healed him with Wakandan technology. Instead, Killmonger chooses to die, resolving his own story by looking at Wakanda as he dies rather than submit to bondage. No one seems to like this. Maybe Killmonger should’ve lived for another film. Maybe he should’ve repented and joined T’Challa’s humanitarian mission. Or maybe T’Challa should’ve spared him. Or so just about anyone who’s written on this topic argues.
3. He never resolves the tension between his anti-oppression politics and his training.
I’m a bit wary of overusing Audre Lorde‘s quote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Why? It’s a difficult quote with both obvious surface meanings and difficult deeper ones.
But it’s hard not to appeal to Lorde here. Killmonger was nothing if not someone impacted by oppression and trained in combat by an oppressor. The guy was a US soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s at least an apparent tension there, and it’s a tension he never resolves. T’Challa hits him with it in their final battle: “You have become them!”. I’m not arguing that T’Challa’s right as much as I’m arguing that Killmonger didn’t have a good answer.
4. People with particular approaches to politics turn him into their champion or their enemy.
This is ultimately what the Killmonger Rorschach Test is all about. Jason Johnson from The Root reads Killmonger as a reductio against violent extremism. Brooke Obie, in Shadow and Act, reads him as a representation of generational racial trauma. Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic, reads him as a fanatic bent on world domination who uses black liberation and US foreign policy jargon to achieve his goals. Contrary to Serwer, Matthew Rozsa, in Salon (and, for that matter, also Steven Thrasher, in Esquire), reads Killmonger as a genuine black nationalist the film was too timid and conservative to celebrate. And, finally, Christopher Lebron, in Boston Review, reads him as a symbolic devaluation of the lives of black men.
That’s a wide range of opinion!
5. He strikes me as a particular kind of identitarian.
I suppose I have to give my own reading of Killmonger to complete this list. I’ve written in the past about a sort of view I call ‘identitarianism‘. I think it’s a political extension – and, at least in the US, often a perversion – of identity politics. The identitarian is someone so taken with identity, so sure of its political and explanatory power, that they reduce politics to identity, whether to one or to all aspects of identity.
In Killmonger’s case, it’s race-identitarianism. Like The Root, I found his underlying commitment to ending oppression a noble one. And he indeed had all the flaws many other sources attribute to him. But I think the reason he had those flaws is that he became wholly absorbed by race. He fell so deeply into race and its power that he failed to recognize any flaw in himself. Specifically, in himself as an oppressed black man. Killmonger used race – and his own experience of racial oppression and the moral warrant he believed that experience gave to him – as a shield to guard himself against any doubt about the nobleness of his cause, his methods, and himself.
The Rorschach Test
I shared my own reading of Killmonger not to argue I’m right, or that anyone else is wrong. As far as which reading of the character I found most compelling, I’d probably cite Doreen St. Félix’s in The New Yorker. But I’m not sure what the criterion of correctness would be here, exactly. I shared it because I think it flows neatly from certain political interests of mine, namely my interest in how identities figure into US politics and how identity relates to society. As for the other authors I cited, I think they come from a similar place. Their readings say as much – or more – about their own concerns as it does the film Black Panther.
Why? Because Killmonger is a Rorschach Test.
What To Read Next?
If you liked this post, why not check out other posts on race or film? Here are a few:
Using Identity as Political Currency
Two Concepts of White Privilege
Prison Abolition: Variations on a Theme
Green Book and Teen Vogue
Booksmart and Good Boys
5 Successful Anti-Capitalist Films
