Black Panther's Erik Killmonger is the quintessential super-villain. His character fulfils the requirements of the typical superhero movie with good guys versus bad ones and his demise at the end is inevitable.
How could we possibly find anything positive about him? Actually, there is much more to his character than just evil. In fact, I think his character has a lot to teach us.
Many critics have highlighted his killings, his CIA connection and his imperialist power lust. They focus on his bloody trail of slaughter and his destruction of the magical flowers that energize the spirit of Wakanda.
But consider his hate both for the oppressors of Black people and for the pretentious isolationism of Wakanda that cared nothing about Blacks elsewhere, and his plans of global insurgencies to liberate Black people.
While condemnation of Killmonger is to be expected, it's unfortunate if it occludes his historical significance. Killmonger is larger, more complex, and deserving of more nuanced appraisal. His character reflects the anger, frustrations, hopes, yearnings and aspirations of young and old African-Americans today.
Killmonger's character represents the dialectical struggles - the complex history of debates and raucous disagreements among African American leaders - over their conflicting strategies and methods to win freedom from slavery, colonialism, racism and oppression.
Black liberation struggles
Killmonger shares a central and enduring goal with many previous Black leaders; the dream of freedom for his people and of righting injustices against them.
Consider abolitionist David Walker, who in 1830, against the prevailing gradualism of the abolitionist movement, circulated an appeal for Blacks to resist their oppressors with violence. He argued that kidnappers and murderers of Black people were enemies of God whose death when being resisted was justified.
In an argument similar to Walker's, abolitionist and minister Henry Highland Garnet in 1843 informed his fellow Blacks how sinful it was for them to submit to degradation and oppression, to "a state of slavery where you cannot obey the commandments of the Sovereign of the universe." Calling for a violent rebellion, he contended it was the Blacks' "solemn and imperative duty to use every means both, moral, intellectual, and physical, that promises success."
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