The artwork above is from the artist Aira O Crespo. He is known for paying homage to black people in his street art throughout Rio de Janeiro. Check out his instagram here. You can find this image at the end of Fundição Progresso street in Lapa.
In the last five years, Black Brazilian pride has exploded in Brazil.
And the Black Panther movie played a significant part.
Let me explain something to you. Black Brazilians aren’t automatically born knowing their ethnicity or being proud of their heritage. It’s often a painful process they must undergo that starts with a horrible incident. Someone calls them a name. They are embarrassed publicly. Racism is thrown in their face (cause you know it can be quite subtle in Brazil). Now this still happens, but now Black Brazilians are awakening to their “blackness” through more positive pathways like the Black Panther movie. This is especially true for Black Brazilian children.
For many Black Brazilians (and especially children), Black Panther was the first time they saw a black man or a black woman on a big screen being portrayed in a positive and powerful light.
When the Black Panther movie arrived in Brazil, Black Brazilians organized rolezinho pretos “Black outings” (https://theintercept.com/2018/02/22/black-panther-brazil-protest/to see the movie together.
Ygor Marinho, a 28-year-old resident of Rio de Janeiro, was similarly moved when he watched the film on Monday. “A movie with 90 percent black actors fills me with pride,” Marinho said. “It makes me want to win. It makes me want to fight. It makes me like myself more, like my own skin tone, like my kind of hair, like the shape of my nose, like the shape of my lips, like myself more. Because you start to see people who are like you and you see how they carry themselves — empowered, happy with themselves — and you start to like yourself better. And you see there’s nothing wrong with you — that, really, black is beautiful, black is capable, black is incredible, and blackness needs to be respected.”
One group in São Paulo rented out an entire movie theater. Groups in Rio de Janeiro organized outings to Rio’s malls, traditionally places that are off-putting to Black people. Favela activists raised money and organized busses to take children from their communities to see the movie.
Buuba Aguiar, an activist, recounted when she organized a busload of children from her Acari favela to go see Black Panther. After watching the movie, one young man came up to her with his wide-open eyes said: “Auntie, I loved it! He looks just like me!
He was talking about T’Challa—Chadwick Bosemam.
Boseman’s death is a loss for Black people across the world!
Chadwick was incredible for his talent as an actor, for always standing for our people, for his roles that represented us so well and for incarnating with so much truth, a black hero, leader of a black nation, who spoke of what we truly are: beauty, history , knowledge, tradition, culture ...
The Black Panther movie, and Boseman’s character T’Challa, also helped Black Brazilians to imagine a Black world where black people controlled their own destinies. When the movie opened in Brazil, “Black Money” became a hot topic among many Black Brazilians.
I even wrote about it for Quartz in 2018.
The self-sufficiency of Black Panther’s Wakanda is inspiring Afro-Brazilians to look to their own
https://qz.com/africa/1224485/black-panther-shook-up-brazils-black-afro-brazil/
They were also a positive signal to the mainstream and Afro-Brazilians themselves that they could economically support products that represented them on a large scale. Since the debut of Black Panther in Brazil, the “Black Money” movement—the idea that black Brazilians can use their money to support black businesses—has gained steam and support has even crossed over into mainstream media.
Black Panther may have well been the first “black family” movie to be distributed in Brazil.
Brazilians are known for having extravagant themed-birthday parties. After Black Panther, black kids across Brazil clamored to have “Black Panther” themed parties.
Thank you Chadwick Boseman.