Wakanda whenever? Black to the Afro-future

Yet all is not rosy either. Fifty years ago a commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson after dozens of riots erupted nationwide concluded that our nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal."

A 50-year follow up report, "Healing Our Divided Society," acknowledges progress in closing economic, social and political gaps between racial groups -- including economic growth and the election and re-election of an African-American president.

Yet, alas, we still have a ways to go in trying to bridge remaining socioeconomic caps in our society. At this point, as we ponder what the report will look like 50 years from now, it seems to be altogether fitting and proper that Africans throughout the diaspora are taking this moment to stretch our imaginations to our future Wakandas.

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Johns Hopkins University historian Nathan Connolly likens the film's setting to maroon settlements -- colonies formed in the Americas by escaped slaves and indigenous peoples. To Connolly, Wakanda is a "glittering, cinematic maroon colony to which, for a few hours at least, we can all escape."

Indeed, it is ironic that "Black Panther" began as "The Sensational Black Panther" in 1966 by Marvel masters Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. When the Black Panther Party emerged that same year with a similar emblem, Marvel changed their Black Panther. But now he has been brought back with such current black writers as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxanne Gay.

Connolly traces the scenes and spirit of Wakanda back to earlier maroon societies like Haiti, after it broke away from France -- and touched off a war of sorts with alarmed slaveholders in the nearby United States. "Black utopias are nothing new," Connolly writes.

In that broader historical context we should not be surprised that black Americans and others throughout the diaspora reach to Wakanda as a stand-in for the civilization that we have been unable to achieve in real-life, as much as many of us are still working on it.

This is not a dialogue limited to blacks only. The conservative National Review's Jim Geraghty enjoyed the movie but offers a cautionary note about utopian thinking. "Wakanda can't exist, not owning to any inherent flaw in Africans but because of the inherent flaws of human beings," he writes.

"Every human society involves trade-offs. ... In theory you can avoid wealth disparity through socialism, but collectivism destroys the incentives to create, innovate and work hard, and a corrupt few inevitably rise to the top, creating new wealth disparities. People have to choose what values they prioritize in their nation."

Indeed we must. But every vision begins with some imagination. Wakanda, I suspect, gives us a vision of paradise that has ancient roots. But it also echoes in today's social arguments. The two principal male stars offer a leadership choice similar to that offered by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, among other leaders of the past.

At that level, Wakanda offers not a "promised land" as much as a place to get to work and rebuild the sense of community and productivity that can build a new history, better than the one that colonialism and slavery hijacked in our real world.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)