Allow me to be vulnerable for a moment and share one of my character flaws with you. I am a product of video/computer games, and while my wife views this as a flaw, this is not the character deficiency I am confessing. Like many children of my generation, I was a latch-key kid. My Atari 2600 was my babysitter. It occupied my days and nights until my mother got home and then summoned me to report on what I had done with my day. Then I was forced to do some form of school work to keep my mind sharp or practice my piano lesson. My father didn’t care as long as I did not make a mess. He knew it kept me in the house, and I was less prone to get in trouble playing with a joystick. Later my Nintendo Entertainment System would become my new guardian.
I will turn 50 soon, and I still play video games. As I type this I am simultaneously playing a mobile game. However, that is not what I want to divulge to you. My confession is that I can only play these games if I play as the hero. I cannot play as a villain. I do not know what it is about me that does not allow me to participate in the chaos and anarchy sowed by being the bad guy. Perhaps the reason is that when I was growing up, none of the villains on TV or on the big screen that had schemes to conquer the world were black. I had no villains to admire or to pattern my villainy after…until Kang.
Kang is the villain that I needed my whole life. It was not until I saw Jonathan Majors give him life in the season finale of Loki that I saw someone that I could root for. I know the the multiverse menace is no longer the Phase 6 Big Bad. I'm also aware that Doctor Doom has replaced him as the marquee villain. But humor me while I make this point. Some of you will yell the name Erik Killmonger as an alternate choice, but he was too small for me. He was using stolen technology from black people to help other black people. While his goals were noble, his tactics I could not abide with. Moreover, he was born of tragedy. Finding his father murdered by his Uncle altered him. From that moment forward, he dedicated his life to getting revenge. I don’t need that Bruce Wayne-type trauma.
Kang is a black man who conquered the universe to prove to his selves that he was the best iteration of all of them. He was not the spawn of tragedy but the byproduct of boredom. He conquered not to save the universes but because they existed and thus needed to be conquered.
Kang is the villain that I needed when I was five. He arrived almost 45 years later, but now that he is here, I am going to celebrate him.
I cannot think of one black villain that movie franchises revolve around that has the power to crush the whole world. Usually, the black villains are drug dealers, pimps, gang members, or dirty cops. We have never had a black villain like Kang—a man whose intellect and sheer force of will is what has allowed him to conquer universes. Kang is the first time I saw a villain on this scale that looks like me, and I am ok with that.
I hear all of you…the negative portrayals of black men have to stop in the media… I agree, but Kang is to be celebrated. A black man who is superior in every way: physically, mentally, intellectually, tactically, emotionally, and in other areas, we are not privy to yet.
Kang is more brilliant than Tony Stark and Hank Pym. His strength allows him to dispatch the God of Thunder like he is a random NPC. Kang is a ruler of the multiverse and he is black like me.
Kang does not have a tragic backstory where his environment or parents molded him into the monster he has become. He dominates because he seeks adventure. He laid waste to universes because he was bored, and it sounded fun.
Kang is not motivated by riches or fame; he destroys universes because he can. His only competition for ultimate power is variations of himself. Kang is the villain the world need: a physically gifted and intellectually superior black man, which makes people mad and this black man proud.
The racist right does not know how to attack Marvel and Disney for this act of wokeness because making a black man a homicidal maniac might not actually be woke. That is the rub. His brawn and brute force are in line with these bigots' conceptualization of black men. The desire to enslave and subjugate the masses fits into their fever dreams of what black people would do to white people if they ever obtained power. All of these aspects of Kang they do not find fault with. It is his intellect that has them upset.
Of all the people in the universe, it was a black man who was able to solve the dilemma of multiversal travel. It was a black man who was able to bring peace to the universe by creating a bureaucracy. It was a black man whose intellect allowed us to carry on with our mundane lives. He was the puppetmaster; we all were his puppets and not even our brightest minds could see the strings. It is this that makes the right and those with racial animus uncomfortable. The depiction of a black man as a genius is a bridge too far for many bigots.
The problem is these racists lack the words or dog whistles to defame Kang. He is a criminal, a villain, a deceiver, and everything that fits their worldview, except that he is smart. They agree with 90% of what Marvel says about this black man, but the last 10% they find deeply troubling.
Gone are the days when they could say a negro can’t be that smart and that would be the end of the debate. Instead, they have to find a way to say it without saying the quiet part out loud: a negro is not smart enough to be Kang.
According to them, Thanos could have been black, and they would not be all in their feelings. Thanos was strong and a force of nature. He physically bested all of the Avengers but he was not a superior intellect. In the end, he was defeated by a brilliant white man. Even with Captain Marvel, a white woman, being the most powerful Avenger, the incels were not upset because Tony Stark’s intellect ultimately saved all of us. Not the might of a white woman but the brains of a white man was our savior.
The fictional depiction of a black man who murders innocents and enslaves the survivors is not woke in their Viagra-addicted minds; it is their paranoid-induced reality. It is the intellect that they find disagreeable. Until they can forge a new word that can unsheath and wave in front of their audiences to rile them up to manufacture a fake outrage…Kang might be left alone for the time being.
I now see a path for me to play the villain in my precious video games. I now see a villain that I can daydream about. I have an avatar that matches my cunning and intellect. If I were a villain, you bet I would not be some pimp or street-level drug dealer but a man who conquers the multiverse. I would be Kang.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.