“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” has racked up praise and an Oscar nomination for its positive portrayal of a mythical African country from which superheroes rise. If it were real, Wakanda would be an incredible place: forward-thinking in technology, yet still holding fast to its rich traditions.
The Left hates both of these things, however, when applied to the United States. Our technology gets trashed as destroying the planet. Our traditions are smeared by people steeped in Marxist critical race theory, our heroes denigrated, and our statues and monuments pulled down or vandalized.
The sad fact is the same hate-filled Left is busy not just tearing down America but ignoring the real present-day achievements and courage of great black Americans. These Americans refuse to be victims. They refuse to be bullied. But they also refuse to be penned up in the Left and its false, anti-American narratives.
Winsome Sears came to the United States from Jamaica at the age of 6. To the American Left’s way of thinking, she ought to be an intersectional champion—a woman (when they choose to define the term), an immigrant, and black.
True, she’s a legal immigrant, so that’s a strike against her if you’re on the Left.
Sears has never been anyone’s victim. She worked hard, excelled in school, and joined the United States Marines, where she served as an electrician. Her life of public service also includes running a shelter for the Salvation Army. When she entered politics, Sears started shattering walls immediately. She upset a career Democratic politician and became the first female, black, naturalized citizen to serve in the Virginia House. Today Winsome Sears is Virginia’s first female, black, naturalized citizen to serve as the commonwealth’s lieutenant governor.
You’d think all this would have made Sears the toast of every network and print newsroom in the country. The problem with Sears is she’s a conservative Republican. Those two words erase all of her intersectional wins and all of her real achievements for the Left. So they pretend she doesn’t exist.
The Left and the corporate media do the same, and have for decades, with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In fact, they tried to destroy Thomas before his career on America’s highest court ever started. Then-Senator Joe Biden led that racist charge, attempting to tie Thomas to spurious sexual harassment charges. That was rich, given the fact that the white Biden was acting as a henchman for the white Senator Ted Kennedy, who had left a young woman to drown to save his own career, and who had built up a legendary sexcapades career himself.
Biden’s shameless smearing of Thomas failed to keep him from becoming just the second black man to serve on the Supreme Court, where he has built up a career noted for its independence and fearlessness as a consistent champion of American constitutional government.
Like Winsome Sears, Thomas would be one of the most celebrated black men of all time, but for the fact that he’s a conservative Republican.
Dave Chappelle isn’t a conservative Republican at all, but he’s still a hero. Why? Because he believes in the bedrock American principle of free speech and fearlessly defends it with his life. That’s no exaggeration: After one of his Netflix comedy specials outraged the Left, a man attacked Chappelle on stage with a handgun that also had a knife blade. Such an attack tends to be classified as attempted murder. The culprit got less than a year in jail for the crime, which he said was triggered by the jokes Chappelle and another comedian told. Jokes that work well are often said to “kill,” but only in our snowflake age may they get the comedian who tells them killed.
Chappelle has faced more than that one attack. His comedy specials spare no one from his laser-sharp humor, including the trans community which has tried to force an ideological dictatorship on the world over the past few years (with help from the feeble-minded but opportunistic Joe Biden). Chappelle doesn’t hate trans people, he’s made that clear, but he despises psychological and ideological oppression. He’s made that clear too. He’s faced numerous attempts to cancel him, and that actual physical attack, for his courage.
The Left doesn’t celebrate this real black American hero. It wants his career ended and his Netflix contract ripped up. To its credit, Netflix stands by Chappelle and is maybe the last bastion for real free speech in the United States.
America isn’t short of black heroes who live real lives in our real, amazing country. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is the first black man to serve as a senator from the South since Reconstruction. Michael Williams was a successful energy industry regulator in Texas years ago, where Wallace Jefferson served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Leo Terrell is one of the most successful civil rights litigators in the United States. Denzel Washington is one of the most successful actors in Hollywood. All of these and many more black Americans succeed every day, living by their principles, never tearing America down, always showing gratitude for living in (what was, and should be again) the freest and greatest country the world has ever known.
None of them are celebrated as the bona fide real-life heroes they are. Americans of all backgrounds should celebrate our real heroes, and take a small break from the vibranium-rich mythical land of make-believe.