Wakanda: The Chocolatest City

Marvel Studios’ Black Panther lands amid an intense discussion around what it means for African Americans to have their own safe space, or sanctuary, in a country built on their exploitation, during a time of nativist influenza. The movie also arrives at an epoch wherein the phenom known as the “Chocolate City”—a city where African Americans constitute the majority of residents and are its political and economic leaders—may be in its last days. Washington, D.C. was once the prototype, and indeed the funk pioneers George Clinton and Bernie Worrell deemed the District the “capital” of all Chocolate Cities when they coined the term for a song in 1975. But in 2011, D.C. lost its African-American majority and suddenly it was losing its grip on the Chocolate title.

Nathalie Hopkinson wrote in her 2012 book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City: “When you happen to be born black in a world designed for white people, to live in a Chocolate City is to taste an unquantifiable richness. It gives a unique angle of vision, an alternate lens to see world power.”