On the night Chadwick Boseman died, we tweeted something to the effect that it would be smart for white culture writers to cede the floor to their Black colleagues at least in the initial few hours after the shocking announcement, in order to give them precedence to frame the discussion surrounding a figure of cultural importance. We envisioned a bunch of insensitive “What Marvel Should Do With the Black Panther Franchise Now” takes going out before anyone had a chance to talk about how meaningful his life was – and it turns out that’s exactly what happened. But a couple of well-established media figures immediately screen-shot the tweet and invited their followers to mock us for our piously performative wokeness. We mention this not as an airing of grievances but as an illustration (to us, at least) that the idea of not weighing in on a topic was more alien to some people in media than we had realized.
