Black Panther - the villain is an extremist with a point. Killmongers desire for revenge and modes go too far. He should be better, like the royal family are. Luckily Killmonger inspires the legitimate authority to make a choice to do more and be more benign. Maybe he just should have trusted in the legitimate authorities all along and stayed inside the social bounds… Which had not made change until his use of force and theft?

That basic theme and tension is present in a lot of black American discourse, of how much to work within the rules of the system and how much to actually violate the rules of the system in order to effectuate change. You can place a lot of the black civil rights icons onto the spectrum of how to use law breaking or violence as means to protect or advance black rights.

During the abolitionist era before the Civil War, David Walker called on slaves to physically overpower and literally kill their masters, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated for violent rebellion to overturn slavery.

Post-emancipation, anti-lynching advocate Ida Wells called on black families to arm themselves, to provide the protection that the law would not. Malcolm X also advocated for self defense, and predicted violence as the inevitable consequences of continued oppression of black Americans (which some took to mean he also advocated for initiating violence to advance black rights “by any means necessary,” but I personally think those views ignore nuance and context).

Each of these controversial figures often had a more nonviolent contemporary who advocated for less violent means to win hearts and minds.

Black Panther’s writer and director, Ryan Coogler, definitely knows all of this. He’s steeped in black history, both the history itself and the history of the art and literature and discourse around those topics. Placing that conflict and tension at the center of a freaking Marvel movie, designed to be a high budget blockbuster, was basically a work of genius.

The movie itself ultimately takes the side that coexistence is a better goal than reversing the subjugation, to oppress the former oppressor. But that doesn’t really much fit within the debate of this original comic, of whether the superhero movies advocate for preserving the status quo.