The Falcon and Winter Soldier finale hit Disney+ last week and I am in AWE of what they did with this production. Aside from carrying on the legacy of my second favorite Avenger (nobody beats Dr. Strange), the writers succeeded in addressing the systematic racism in our country with tact, taste, and style.
When I was growing up, we were taught that the United States was a “melting pot” in which every man, woman, and child of every culture, skin tone, and worldview could “blend in” to achieve the common good. When I grew wiser, I saw that our nation was more of a “salad bowl”– the croutons, the salad, the tomatoes etc., all remained separated from one another to make the plate.
Sam Williams, a black man with no supernatural gifts or skills, is the main character in the most recent adaptation of the MCU, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier. He’s a black man in the salad bowl of America, and his experience as a citizen and as a soldier has led him to believe that the words “one nation, under God, indivisible” are simply a boldfaced lie.
Sam became the Falcon in the second cinematic installation of the Captain America franchise. He made sporadic appearances in a few other Marvel movies but was never considered a key member to the super squad. This raised a lot of eyebrows early in the MCU adaptations because with Captain America (white), Thor (white) Iron Man (white), and dominating the screen time, multi-cultural audiences started clapping back with “Hey, where’s the diversity?” Granted, Black Panther (and to a lesser extent, War Machine) addressed some of those issues (brilliantly), but we were still left a lot of unanswered questions.
Then, Cap retired and passed his shield on to Sam, justly giving his power, his title, to a black man who was worthy of accepting it.
Here’s the rub, Sam didn’t accept it. Without spoiling the entire series for you, it’s sufficient to know that he refused to be Captain America because he didn’t feel worthy due to a varied degree of factors, one of the main ones being because he didn’t think the nation would ever accept a black Captain America.
The series finale, however, pulled this darkness out of the American history and exposed it in a triumphant act of humanistic servitude. In an exchange with Isaiah, a black super soldier that (quasi) mentors Sam, he tells our hero “I ain’t gonna lie. You’re special. I mean, you ain’t no Malcolm, Martin, Mandela…” to which Sam responds, “No argument there, but I know what I gotta do.”
Bruh, you already did it– you became Captain America. And the salad bowl became the melting pot for 50 glorious minutes.
The real question we all have to ask ourselves as a society is…
Do we know what we gotta do?
