Voter Registration Drive at Black Panther Screenings is the Purest American Activism – By Elura Nanos (lawandcrime.com) / Feb 20 2018
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is a beautiful and gripping movie that has as its central question, “what does a fortunate nation owe the rest of the world?” It is entertaining and provocative, exciting and sensitive, and is about Blacks without being about racism. And it’s killing at the box office.
Last October, three women, Kayla Reed, Jessica Byrd, and Rukia Lumumba launched the Electoral Justice Project (EJP). Working under the umbrella of activist group Movement for Black Lives, the trio of changemakers recognized a valuable opportunity. Coincident with the opening of Black Panther, they started #WakandaTheVote and turned Black Panther screenings into giant voter registration drives.
https://twitter.com/JessicaLBYRD/status/964163141612523521
According to the EJP’s website, its mission is as follows:
We recognize that electoral work alone will not change the conditions plaguing Black communities, but we believe that Black people deserve a loving and strategic political home to seek transformational political change.
This upcoming spring and November 2018 midterm elections are an important step in building that new world, and we want to take every opportunity to engage our communities in the conversation of electoral justice. We will be registering people to vote at movie theaters across the country so that we can #wakandathevote at the ballot box.
Wakanda, the setting of much of Coogler’s movie, is a fictional East African nation that has appeared in the Marvel Comics universe since the mid-1960s. Also going on since well before the mid-60s (even before Russia had a hand in such things) have been wide scale voter suppression efforts aimed at minimizing the impact of the Black vote in American politics. Given the history, the work of Reed, Byrd, and Lumumba seems worthy of unfettered support. Of course, though, there was bound to be some backlash, particularly from the “keep politics out of my entertainment” set:
I think this is an insulting political ploy to movie-goers directed at a particular race. How is this not racist? Hollywood liberal elitists & Democrats believe certain races cannot register to vote on their own? https://t.co/2egRAiGXyb #BlackPanther #MAGA #MAGA2018 @TrueTheVote
— A Secure Country has Secure Borders (@Sick_of_Bias) February 19, 2018
https://twitter.com/Riverboys/status/965388451284684800
It strikes me, though, that efforts like #WakandaTheVote are truly the purest and most American political activism out there. When the focus is encouraging Americans to participate in our own democracy, there can be no downside, regardless of how any particular person votes. Even in the idyllic society of Wakanda itself, individuals have fierce differences of opinion; neither divergence nor diversity is dangerous to a successful society – but silence is.
The #WakandaTheVote effort is so smart. https://t.co/HxZdMgH1ZL
— Jamil Smith جميل كريم (@JamilSmith) February 18, 2018
PB/TK – It’s not a bad idea, yet some will freak about it. We complain people aren’t voting or unable to register for whatever reasoning, so why not a movie a premiere or auto show or gun show? Hell how many events are there with people trying to get you to subscribe to their newspaper or sign up for a credit card
