The CIA is also widely believed to have meddled heavily in the governments of Chad and Angola. The 1962 arrest of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela was claimed by ex-CIA agent Donald Rickard to have come as a result of a CIA tip-off. At the time, Mandela was considered a communist enemy of the U.S. and a dangerous revolutionary. He spent 27 years behind bars before his release and election as South Africa’s first black president.
Not surprisingly, the fact that a black revolutionary leader in “The Black Panther” is the bad guy, while the CIA agent is a good guy, rubs some black audiences the wrong way. Writing for “Esquire,” Steven Thrasher asks, “Does the film ask its audience to root for the wrong character?”
“Killmonger wants to use Wakanda’s weapons to stop the suffering of black people globally, and we, the audience, are manipulated into rooting against this because we live in an ideology in which nonviolence is always expected of black people no matter what,” Thrasher writes. “I could not bring myself to root against Killmonger’s desire to help the black diaspora any more than I could begrudge him wanting to take the throne of… the child of the man who’d killed his father.”
Thrasher also quotes author James Baldwin, who believed white people wanted to think of black people as nonviolent because “white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.”
It should be noted that the CIA tried to influence the writing of many authors and artists, including Baldwin, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This organization, founded by intellectuals in 1950, was later revealed to be secretly sponsored by the agency.
Thrasher is critical of how Killmonger is morally contrasted with Ross aka “your friendly neighborhood CIA agent,” noting that the agent prevents “Killmonger’s crew from exporting weapons from Wakanda to help black people.” Ross, Thrasher argues, is therefore used tovalidate and excuse U.S. imperialism, “granting cover to how the CIA (in our Wakanda-less world) has been arming African countries and playing them against each other for decades.”
There’s also a Twitter hashtag, #TeamKillmonger, that expresses the views of filmgoers like Thrasher, who are more sympathetic to the anti-hero than the dull-by-comparison heir to Wakanda.
The movie also seems to track with a political realignment in regards to U.S. intelligence. Since the Ronald Reagan era, Republicans have typically viewed the CIA as the movie treats agent Ross: the ultimate good guy. By contrast, many Democrats have often been far more skeptical.
In the Trump era, however, these positions have been essentially reversed. Conflicts between the president and the national security apparatus appear to have encouraged many Democrats’ friendlier stance toward to the agency.
If there’s a new stage in the rapprochement between Hollywood, American liberals, and the national security state, Agent Ross’s leap from an inept comic book character to an adroit film persona may capture it. “The Black Panther” takes moviegoers for a ride — but perhaps not quite as liberating as it promises.
Lynn Stuart Parramore is a cultural theorist who studies the intersection between culture and economics. Her work has appeared at Reuters, Quartz, Lapham’s Quarterly, Salon, VICE, Huffington Post and others.
Article Appeared @https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-does-white-cia-agent-play-hero-killmonger-s-villain-ncna855401