Judas and The Black Messiah: A Deciphering Review

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Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) is a call back to the historical Black power era to re-tell the story of Fred Hampton. Against popular depictions of the Black Panther Party as a violent terroristic group, director Shaka King offers an alternative narrative in which Hampton is assassinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the help of an information William “Bill” O’Neal. By King’s own admission, this film is an allegory for the present post/Ferguson era which is meant to drive its audiences toward a more nuanced political consciousness concerning the fight to make Black lives matter (Russell 2021). Rather than uncritically praise or malign Judas and the Black Messiah (JATBM), this review engages Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) notion of a “deciphering” practice which thinks through both the Black radical excess and residues of Western Man present in popular media/art. The point, then, is not to render a yes/no judgement on this film, but to instead think through the multiple and sometimes conflicting messages we receive about Black liberation in our current cultural moment.