The central triumph of Black Panther, though it's merely one of many, is that the story Coogler and his cowriter, Joe Robert Cole, have devised is even better and richer than could have been imagined — not only because it owes so
much to
racial questions of the kind the Marvel Universe hasn't encountered before, but also because we're 17 movies
deep into said universe and well versed in its foibles and missed opportunities.
I have spent most of my three and a half decades dutifully adhering to the «one - drop» rule — that rigid plantation custom of hypodescent, arriving at an essentialized
racial identity without
much friction — despite suspecting
deep down what my test results made plain: the majority of my ancestry is «Broadly Northern European».