My phone has been close to collapse for a while now. I’ve needed to get a new one since early this year, but I was out of work for a few months and didn’t have the money to do it. And then I got another job, and I haven’t wanted to take the time to look into buying and setting up a new one. That’s always an enormous pain in the ass. It’s hard to pick a good time to disrupt your life, you know?
Plus, I've had this phone since October 2017, and it has a lot of my life on it, and it's hard to let it go. A lot of trips and friends and smiles and memories are housed in it. I have a hard time parting with that kind of thing. But I know it’s getting close to time to get a replacement, so I’ve been preparing for that inevitability.
I've been transferring files from my phone to my hard drive off and on for a couple weeks now, and today I got to the picture above. It's from early 2018, when Grant was all about Black Panther. He walked around wearing that mask and claw for weeks. He wore them all year, really, and he still has them out in the garage somewhere. I see him running around in them from time to time.
When I saw this picture, I thought of Chadwick Boseman’s death again, and it hit me again how far-reaching and important his influence was in such a short time. He's played some prominent roles since 2013 that were true cultural touchstones: Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in Get on Up, Thurgood Marshall in Marshall, and – of course – T’Challa in Black Panther. His portrayals helped people better understand the cultural significance of these characters, and he especially elevated the larger idea of Black representation in his role as Black Panther.
Boseman's great strength in that role was that he helped make T’Challa so cool he became ubiquitous. He wasn’t just a black superhero—he was a cool, collected, strong, dignified, agile, badass hero that every kid wanted to be. This is what effective representation looks like. It’s not tokenism or exoticism. It’s celebration and inclusion. Normalization and presence and matter-of-factism. I know it wasn’t just Boseman who was responsible for that. It was the writers, directors, producers, and MCU showrunners who took that chance and wove Black Panther into their larger narrative the same way they did with Anthony Mackie’s Falcon.
But Boseman was the face of that. He played that role perfectly, like he was the embodiment of the Black Panther Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created in Fantastic Four (except with 21st century sensibilities). His T’Challa was full of dignified, reluctant nobility. Grace. Heart. And from all accounts, that’s what Boseman brought with him everywhere he went, even as he was battling cancer over the last four years. He was good to fans and kids. He knew what his portrayal meant to Black audiences, and he embraced it. He reached out and gave a lot of himself, even as his body was attacking him and making that outreach painful.
I was reminded again today that my white kid loved Black Panther. Still does. And Boseman was a big reason for that. Finding that picture of Grant at the kitchen table a couple years ago brought all of that flooding back in a bittersweet way today. Chadwick Boseman died far too soon, but he left a lot of his heart behind. I’m grateful we all got to share in that while he was with us.
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