By Michael-Ray Mathews
Most of my friends and family saw the Black Panther movie two or three times. I saw it twice during the week it was released. I first viewed it on opening night in Kansas City, MO in preparation for a visit to Chicago where I would interview Dr. Otis Moss III of Trinity United Church of Christ for my Prophetic Resistance Podcast. We spoke after viewing it a second time with his congregation. Since that visit, I have been considering the next opportunity to view it, stream it, purchase it and consume it.
When a film captures my imagination, I tend to watch again and again. This is true for movies like The Color Purple, School Daze, Lean on Me, Crash, Moonlight, and Get Out. I’ve watched the movie Cry Freedom hundreds of times since its release in 1987. The story of South African activist Steve Biko disrupting the logic and structures of the apartheid system is heartbreaking and compelling. It was one of the first times I began to fathom the insidious and pervasive quality of anti-Black racism. Racism was more than the stories my elders taught me about Jim Crow in the U.S. South. It was a global reality with a long and violent history.
My parents drove fifty miles into town, where I was a college sophomore, to take me to see this movie. It was clear that this story mattered to them. It was clear that they wanted me to understand the power of this story. It was clear that they wanted me to understand something about the world I was encountering as a young adult of African descent. They wanted to me to understand a painful reality while also imagining a possible reality: a future where Black people everywhere lived with dignity.
Cry Freedom became an imaginary for me. I interpreted my call to ministry through the lens of Steve Biko and Black activists across the globe who channeled anger and grief into acts of faith and moral courage. The history of the Black struggle freedom became the primary context for understanding my vocation. Even as I served a historically-white, multicultural congregation, the bold and inclusive visions of leaders like Biko, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Bishop Leontine T.C. Kelly formed the “mind palace” in which I forged my own commitment to a ministry rooted in social justice and healing.
The journeys of T’Challa, Shuri, Nakia, Okoye, and Killmonger in the Black Panther movie have become for me another prism through which I can re-imagine the world and cultivate Beloved Community. Just the notion of Wakanda – a land largely untouched by the legacy of hegemonic, imperial violence and desecration – opens up imaginative possibilities (and cautionary tales) for communities committed to human dignity, just economies, and deep belonging.
The Prophetic Resistance Project envisions the creation of spaces for “sacred reimagining.” The narrative model at the center of the project – Theology of Resistance – facilitates the creation and transmission of stories that activate our faith-filled commitments to resist injustice and cultivate Beloved Community together. We seek to instigate uncommon counters that disrupt our presumptions about ourselves and our world, clearing a path for reimagining and making a world where racism and patriarchy are robbed of their power to distort and diminish our humanity.
By engaging the powerful stories from our lived experiences and our sacred traditions, we are constructing a multi-faith, multi-racial imaginary for the work of justice and healing in our communities, nation, and the world. We seek to equip faith leaders and tribal elders with the tools to create spaces for sacred reimagining in their own communities. We endeavor to accompany clergy and congregations in their engagement of the broader community with a compelling and disruptive vision of Beloved Community. We are partnering with our faith and justice organizations to translate these visions into public acts of resistance, concrete policy solutions and transformative ways of living in community.
In our podcast interview with Pastor Moss about the Black Panther movie, we touched on the power of imagination to reshape our understanding of self, others and even the Sacred. “Imagine,” he suggested, “what your theology would look like if Hagar and Sarah look like Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer…All of a sudden, it would be difficult to engage in certain activity if I see the people who I’m interacting with as also a part of the lineage of my religious tradition—then, truly, Black lives would matter.”
What if we could remove the “white gaze” and imagine ourselves anew? What if we could reimagine power in our organizing work? What if our notions of power were informed by Womanist, Mujerista, Indigenous and Asian ethical frames and theologies? Considering the racialized and gendered outcomes of both our conception (imaginings) and practice of power, we are overdue for a new imaginary. Our organizing practices could be re-imagined to, as Dr. Reggie Williams suggests, “undo the way humanity has been structured by white supremacy itself.”
What if we could have Wakanda forever? After watching the Black Panther movie, I engaged in multiple conversations via text, phone, and social media with organizers, clergy, and leaders about the impact of the movie. Most of these exchanges centered on the power of this story for understanding and reimagining our current reality. Among faith leaders, it was clear that Wakanda itself was as powerful a character as T’Challa and Killmonger. It presented viewers with an imaginary, a “mind palace” for the cultivation of Beloved Community. “Wakanda is the imaginative space that Black Liberation Theology has always sought to create,” suggested my colleague Rev. Nelson Pierce.
What if the theologies of resistance that we cultivate in this moment were rooted in the possibility of Wakanda? It would reshape how we engage, partner with and follow young people “marching for their lives” against gun violence. It would radicalize our notions of citizenship and belonging as we stand with and protect immigrant organizers and families targeted, surveilled and rounded up by ICE. It would teach us to trust the Dora Milaje wisdom and imagination Black women in matters related to the thriving and flourishing of all Black lives. It would even root out the logic and impulse of empire embedded in our spiritual traditions and practices.
Empire is always with us. There are powerful narratives and structures that keep us isolated from one another and perpetuate injustice. Our organizing calls us to get into relationships across difference and interrupt patterns of alienation. Our organizing calls us to “see again” the ways in which we can be architects of Beloved Community. So we must be vigilant in our practice of encounter, disruption, reimagining, and action. For if we are not cultivating a moral imagination together, we are probably living inside someone else’s.
Michael-Ray Mathews is director of clergy organizing for PICO National Network, soon to be Faith in Action. Follow him on Twitter at @mrmathews. A version of this essay appeared on Red Letter Christians: https://www.redletterchristians.org/wakanda-forever-cultivating-moral-imagination-beloved-community/
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