For the members of my inaugural class: the brilliant first-years of “Succession”
When the film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, was released to that rare mix of critical and popular esteem in 2018, I knew I was supposed to like it—not just as a progressive but as a critic myself. Indeed, I did: it’s a movie, as Jonathan W. Gray has put it, “whose political theory matches its stunning special effects.” That philosophy coheres in the interplay of the movie’s principal male characters, psychologically nuanced within the fabulous physiques of Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan. Respectively, they play the eponymous hero T’Challa and his nemesis “Killmonger,” duking it out for control of the utopian African country Wakanda, where much of the flick is set. Its paradisal landscape opens up a space for nuanced engagement with the evergreen problem of activism—balancing (Killmonger’s) militance and (T’Challa’s) detached objection to anti-Black racism—that reveals, eventually, a compelling middle ground.
But Wakanda exposes more than that as well. It’s a site for Black women—played wondrously by Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, and Danai Gurira—assuming roles that white, male supremacy has taught us they mustn’t occupy: in the lab, on the throne, and in what passes for the Wakandan Situation Room. It’s no surprise that leaders such as Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris were outspoken fans of the film—and in a spoof for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, that the latter even claimed to be running for public office in a Wakanda no longer shut off from the world.
In other words, Harris’s recent presidential campaign—and the promise it once portended—would have been enough to bring Black Panther to mind in the autumn of 2024. But the mental real estate it’s occupied for me is also due to the fact that I recently taught the movie in a course called “Succession, From Tudor England to HBO.” This, just as Denzel Washington announced he’ll be playing a part in the third installment of the franchise. The myth—a progressive fantasy to countermand so much of the harmful cultural baggage we’ve inherited—continues, presumably more needed than ever.
But while I’ve long appreciated the film—really, that can’t be emphasized enough—something has always rankled me about it, too. I tried to explore what that something was in a piece for The Boston Globe a few years ago, though it took teaching the movie for me, finally, to put my finger on the problem. It’s one that, we’ll see, seems hardly limited to the speculative, aspirational universe of Wakanda but lies at the core of our hopes for a new age of progressive leadership in the United States. It is this vision of future governance—a vision we must conjure up, and finally realize, all the more vehemently in the face of a disastrous new term for Trump—which we might say Black Panther amplifies into daring, otherworldly life.
But what are its fundamental characteristics? Not exclusively white or male or “Western”—but also, in a less positive direction, fully somatopsychically able as well. Which is to say: non-disabled.
In fact, Wakanda is a place where any hope of what the theorist Alison Kafer has called “crip futurity”—the endurance and survival of disabled folks in time—is essentially extinguished. (And I make this observation, it should be said, as a proudly disabled person who lives with a spinal-cord injury, wears hearing aids, maneuvers with a cane, and dons a brace when he walks outside.) The reason for this is Wakanda’s technological sophistication, thanks to its successful mining and ingenious manipulation of the metal vibranium.
Black Panther’s impulse to erase any trace of disability reveals that, for all the film’s progressivism, it also has a distinctly traditional streak—one indebted both to deep-seated sociocultural assumptions and to the conventions of its genre. For even the best utopian texts, from Plato’s Republic (375 BCE) to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516 CE), have long assumed that to perfect society is necessarily to perfect the bodymind as well. In doing so, they imply that disability—for all the very real pain and challenges it can effect—cannot, at the same time, generate any beauty, wisdom, knowledge, desire, ethical insight, aesthetic grandeur: in short, any resources whatsoever. Though quite the opposite is suggested by my own experiences, crip friendships, and understanding of vital disability theorists—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in “The Case for Conserving Disability,” say, or Allison Hobgood in Beholding Disability in Renaissance England. What they argue, specifically, about disability gain is not my point for the moment, however; only that one ideological facet of Wakanda, like More’s “Nowhere” and Plato’s Kallipolis before it, is that incurable no longer signifies. Everything at last can be rectified—and surely that’s an unvarnished good.
But actually that bit about Wakanda being like its predecessors is misleading: Black Panther works against crip futurity more assiduously, even, than the heretic-burning More. In his Utopia, “if the disease is not only incurable but excruciatingly and constantly painful, then the priests and public officials come and urge the invalid not to endure such agony any longer. They remind him that he is now unfit for any of life’s duties, a burden to himself and to others; he has really outlived his own death” (71). There is more than a dose of ableism here—or there would be, clearly, if we’re meant to take any of this seriously in the first place. But there’s a caveat, too: “they never force this step on a man against his will; nor, if he decides against it, do they lessen their care of him” (71). This means, intriguingly, that More has the imaginative capacity to summon up a difference in opinion the creators of Black Panther apparently cannot: someone might rather live disabled than die with supposed honors—or, perhaps even, resist surrender to the totalizing tyranny of cure: its potential for structuring every aspect of one’s life, from exercise and rest to food and hydration, till the attenuating pursuit of wholeness becomes the very mainstay of life. Wakanda’s technological savvy might mitigate against some of this totalitarianism—by rectifying faster, almost seamlessly—but in doing so also amplifies it, by further mystifying the functions and ideological heft of cure. In Wakanda, this process no longer moves slowly enough for us to observe and critique it—for us to dwell in what Eli Care has called a “knot of contradictions” (70): healing may be good, but less good is assuming that ability—as a marker of humanness—must be preserved at all cost. This basic premise, I’d argue, is inhaled by the artistic organism of Black Panther only to be exhaled in our faces with easy gusto.
Of course, this is not to deny the film’s greatness. (Insofar as the moniker means anything at all, “great” art should never be reduced to its creator’s foibles, which all creators have; instead, it exceeds them, by irony or qualification or the sheer force of aesthetic counterweight.) But it is to underscore that Wakanda is a place as beholden to the past as it is anticipatory of a better future—and to point out, moreover, that the general disinterest in this erasure of disability among progressive critics is a telling one, which requires an essay unto itself.
My students made this point about the interweaving of conservative and forward-thinking values in the movie as I directed their attention to two scenes where T’Challa engages in ritualized, one-on-one combat for the throne. The first time, he easily defeats M’Baku with a bit of understated supernatural aid, and ascends to the position his late father had most recently held. Only later does Killmonger best T’Challa in this same, antiquated custom. I made the mistake of asking whether such a tradition discriminates against disabled Wakandans, but of course—as a student chillingly summarized for us—there are no crips in Wakanda to be discriminated against.
Ultimately, I’ve spotlit this troubling feature of the film—at least it’s one in my account—because it highlights a central theme of the class and a truth all too evident in this latest election: anxieties about succession are never simply about who is going to take over, especially when that someone is different from the typical leader in one or more ways. Put otherwise, talk of someone’s “fitness” to rule is rarely just about the leadership chops of that person alone. It is, rather, about our fears of the future, of inclusion and exclusion, of change and difference, of widening the scope of those who might have claim power for themselves—or their brood. The language of “fitness”—in the most literal sense, of who can be workably fit into the existing puzzle of our political system—thus offers a coded language for revealing what matters most to us—and what is most threatening, too. As a result, it brings what some of us might call indiscernible undercurrents of misogyny, racism, homophobia, ableism, and more—often, many at once—to the surface at last.
Much of the class I’m teaching this semester aims to help us look for these discordant strains in political discourse. In Wakanda, for example, the ritual of deciding one’s fitness to govern catches out just how central ableism is to this world. Nor, in my reading—and that of my students—is it totally mitigated by the fact that ritual alone does not a good leader make: it is the collaboration and ingenuity of T’Challa and his supporters that finally restore order and peace.
But do these arguments have any relevance for the real world beyond Black Panther? I think so—in part because, again, Wakanda’s utopian qualities have been touted as a sort of progressive telos. In part, too, because this unqualified understanding of the film is emblematic of how many have made sense of the jagged—catastrophic—twists of the Democratic campaign itself: party leaders at last saw the light and eliminated dysfunction. All of which means that the weak, enervated—even incapacitated—Joe Biden was eventually forced out to make way for the vibrant, joyous, dancing, able-bodied Kamala Harris. (Of course, this is putting the concerns about Trump’s own fitness aside since I’ve written about them before, for Synapsis and STAT.)
There are various places to which we can look for this figuring, but I’ll adduce only one, particularly hilarious, example: Saturday Night Live. For several weekends, the only part of the election I found fun was watching Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris alongside Dana Carvey’s bumbling Joe Biden. He shuffles and stammers, he mumbles and murmurs the same, few catch-phrases time and again. “By the way.” “Here’s the deal.” It’s all fun and games. Insofar as we can be proudly American for anything right now, it is for the fact that parodies of the most powerful figures in the country can be shown so blatantly on TV.
The subtler messaging, however, is indicative of a more concerning, largely unchallenged assumption: a political party committed to looking ahead, to not going back, to being progressive in all the ways I value as much as anyone else, is one that requires someone who can, well, actually move amply ahead herself. Carvey’s Biden becomes a figure, here, for the sort of atavistic frailties—of body and mind—that are best left in the past, valuable till just past their prime before, at last, slowing the whole operation down: a beneficent flip-side to the antediluvian worldview of those on the far-right and their champion of a next president.
This is not quite the same thing as saying Biden should not have bowed out of the race—perhaps he should have done so earlier—much less that we should have no mechanism for assessing the incapacity of our leaders, Trump most of all. But it is to urge circumspection about the scope and implications of our critiques, especially when they involve somatopsychic fitness. It is one thing, after all, to say that a largely unpopular white man who’s been a stalwart leader for decades now should make way for new voices; it is quite another to criticize Biden as an elderly invalid who can’t walk properly to the podium and stand for an entire debate, as some did after his widely-panned performance on June 27, 2024. The former—from a certain angle—might shade into the ageist; but more than that, it centers the kinds of people rarely seen in politics till only recently. The latter, by contrast, could be redeployed to demean anyone who—like me—has an uneven gait and frequently falls; and, in any event, it flirts implicitly with the idea that the dysfunctional bodymind is an inevitable albatross—and that we’d all be better off in Wakanda. Such a conclusion is all the more discouraging when bandied about by those who—and I genuinely believe this—otherwise fight for the safety and empowerment of so many marginalized groups, including those of us with disabilities.
There is something even more discouraging about this limited, and limiting, approach to biodiversity, though: in the end, its subtle ableism will redound most vehemently upon the heads not of folks like Joe Biden, though his achievements couldn’t forestall his ouster this time—or like me (a white, cisgender, gay, sometimes straight-passing, man)—but on female, femme, and/or non-white leaders like Kamala Harris herself.
Much of the work of “Succession,” my class, has been showing just how disqualification of this sort operates since history and literature are replete with examples. Perhaps the most famous in the Anglo-American past is Tudor anxieties about the fitness of female rulers, including “Bloody” Mary Tudor and her more successful sister, Elizabeth I. I can give only a sense for how these debates played out: railing against the “monstrous regiment of women,” the Scottish, hard-line Protestant preacher John Knox declared that “[t]o promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to His revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice” (Stump and Felch 77). In the wake of this claim—that women who dare to reign over men are unnatural to the point of monstrosity, a favorite early modern anti-disabled concept (Bearden 79–80)—what follows reiterates how densely discourses of misogyny and ability were intertwined. Of women, Knox further observes that “Nature … doth paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish” (Stump and Felch 78)—deficient, it turns out, in mind and body alike.
The Calvinist Knox had the ill-fortune of writing what was essentially a fiery polemic against the Catholic Mary Tudor right before Elizabeth, herself a Protestant, unexpectedly took the throne. But the cleric she enlisted to defend her right to rule—John Aylmer—was no prototypical Betty Friedan. In response to worries that Elizabeth, qua woman, would rule irrationally, he emphasizes the counterbalancing presence of wise, male sages, relegating the queen to the place of child king. “[I]f she should judge in capital crimes, what danger were there in her womanish nature?” he asks (Stump and Felch 88). Thank God: “None at all. For the verdict is the twelve men’s, which pass upon life and death, and not hers.”
The takeaway from all this is that wherever misogyny reigns, women are more susceptible to other kinds of othering as well, and it is the site of the bodymind itself where much of this hatefulness comes to a head. Concrete, visible features made into deficiencies always make for a helpful prop and there’s something about disability’s fluidity—the fact, as Lennard Davis has mentioned, that it’s the most labile identity category of all—that activates a particular need for us to distance ourselves from its bounds. Often this distancing takes the form of japes and jeers, some more benign, others downright awful—and the form of uncritically engaging with them, too.
The kind of sneers hissed out by Trump are typically worse than awful—willfully malicious and cruel. Shortly before his victory, he activated ableist language in yet another repudiation of Nancy Pelosi: “She’s a bad person,” he shouted. “Evil. She’s an evil, sick, crazy—Bi—.” The crowd, Michael Gold of The New York Times reported, playfully finished what Trump himself performatively began. Though even this pales in comparison to an earlier swipe he took at Kamala Harris: “she’s a low IQ individual.” With these measly five words, he managed—as only Trump can—to conjure up a matrix of ableist, racist, and misogynistic assumptions, all of them working together to magnify and bolster the general abhorrence of the claim.[2] (It’s worth mentioning that other critiques of Harris–that she’s a “Jezebel,” say–likewise parallel those trotted out in early modernity, against the likes of Mary, Queen of Scots.)[3]
Of course, I’m glad that comments like these have been roundly rebuffed, including by some in the Republican party. But subtler deployments of the intersection of disability, gender, and race—the list goes on—may not be. In fact, they may not be (and have not been) challenged at all—unless we understand the cultural backdrops against which they lean and unless we learn how to identify ableism and root it out, especially those of us who pay lip service to respect and equal justice for all.
Ableist gripes of unfitness were par for the course in Knox and Aylmer’s debate. They’re present, more implicitly, in Black Panther and SNL as well. But they needn’t be so cavalierly evoked—much less invoked—in our political rhetoric and calculus moving forward. In fact, they cannot be—if the goal, now, truly is to reassemble a vision for what we want our future to look like, with what people we want it to be filled, both in politics and in art. May it be one where crips, of all genders and races, classes and creeds, endure, survive, and thrive.
Notes
[1] For this notion of disability as a minority identity, see Siebers 3.
[2] For more on the imbrication of race and disability—both embodied and minded—see, e.g., Barclay, Boster, Franzino, and Hunt-Kennedy.
[3] On the intersection of gender and monarchy in Elizabethan England, see Levin.
Works Cited
Barclay, Jennifer. “Mothering the ‘useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2.2 (2014): 115–140.
Bearden, Elizabeth B. Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2019.
Boster, Dea H. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Davis, Lennard J. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2013. 263-277.
Franzino, Jean. “Lewis Clarke and the ‘Color’ of Disability: The Past and Future of Black Disability Studies.” DSQ 36.4 (2016).
Hunt-Kennedy, Stefanie. Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2013.
Levin, Carole. The Hart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Ed. and rev. tr. George M. Logan. New York: Norton, 2011.
Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2017.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2008.
Stump, Donald V., and Susan M. Felch, eds. Elizabeth I and Her Age. New York: Norton, 2008.
Image: Black-and-white woodcut of a map of Utopia by Ambrosius Holbein, for Thomas More’s Utopia (Nov. 1518 ed., published Johann Froben), from a copy in the Biblioteca nacional de Portugal. [Creative Commons Attribution-Share ALike 4.0]
