Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

White Nationalists Are Trying To Make ‘Black Panther’ About Them

White nationalists are using the story of the hit movie “Black Panther” to boost their claim that nation-states should only have one ethnicity, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Commenters on websites like Twitter, YouTube and 4chan have been claiming that the fictional kingdom of Wakanda, which isolates itself from the world using superior technology, is a model for their vision of a white ethnostate.

“They’re very savvy about social media use. They know if they can cover ‘Black Panther,’ it’ll show up in search results for people looking to learn more about the movie,” Becca Lewis of the think tank Data & Society told the Post. “They try to phrase white nationalism as identity politics for white people. … They’re essentially trying to co-opt its identity politics.”

White nationalists’ embrace of “Black Panther” may be surprising considering the film’s nearly all-black cast and creative team. The film’s only white American character is a butt of jokes and seen as a not-very-helpful sidekick.

Some elements of their support for the film may have been at least partially ironic. As one prominent YouTuber put it, “The alt-right should not only consider supporting the Black Panther movie; they should meme it all over social media and attend screenings en masse, proudly showing their solidarity with him and his values. If not only just for the giggle factor, it would definitely confuse, disorient, and discombobulate those on the far-left.”

Researchers also found that some white nationalists emphasized the number of Jews who worked on the film to support their conspiracy that the media is controlled by Jews.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.