When theorizing film as discourse, which is to say as a form of communication between filmmakers and their viewers, it is crucial to situate individual cinematic discourses within the broader discourses of the culture by which they are conditioned. Marvel’s Black Panther, written and directed by black men, tells a story about a black superhero from a fictional black kingdom that was never colonized by any Western power. It is unquestionably a black movie, and for that reason marks a conspicuous departure from much of the Hollywood film industry. In opening a dialogue on blackness and the African diaspora, Black Panther also, inevitably, initiates a conversation about racialized gender, given the interrelationship of these two identity axes. One such instance, I argue, can be found in the character M’Baku, a mountainous man who not only challenges stereotypes about what a typical vegetarian looks like but, in so doing, simultaneously challenges racist iconographies of black masculinity, and constructs alternatives to the gender configurations available to black men under the logic of colonial violence.