My accent vs Black Panther vs Hollywood vs the British Empire

Welcome to another Deep Dive edition of Are You Sitting Comfortably?

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It’s a difficult thing to challenge social injustices that are bigger and older than we are. Here, I explore the ways in which society can force us to reproduce power systems without even realising it. Get ready for a few raised eyebrows, maybe a furrowed brow, and possibly even a gasp or two of realisation.

Sit back, settle in, and read on for insights and advice on how to push back against ideologies that can feel suffocating, and expose the invisible strings of power that affect us all, all of the time.

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When I recently discovered that the original plan for the character of T’Challa was for Chadwick Boseman to have an arched, clipped, British accent, I did a fast blink. 

It’s been five years since Black Panther was released to a huge, international box office reception. It clocked $192 million in its US opening weekend alone and went on to earn an eyeblinkingly huge $1.3 billion worldwide.

More than this, Black Panther has established itself as being of huge pop cultural significance, central to contemporary conversations of race politics in the context of Black Lives Matter. And, of course, it immortalised the late Chadwick Boseman in a role that elevated Hollywood black excellence to the highest of statuses – a heroic black king at the head of a wildly prosperous, and fictional, African nation.

So to find out that Boseman was originally supposed to sound like some vaguely posh British person was a jolt to the system. It was a reminder that back in 2018, Hollywood wasn’t ready to conceive of an African superhero who actually sounded like they were from Africa. Which in turn was a reminder of the way that Africa, as a concept, has been degraded and denigrated in the mainstream white western consciousness. Which is subsequently a reminder of how white supremacy continues to hold the pen that writes the rules of identity politics.