| When “Black Panther” premièred, in 2018, skeptics wondered whether a film starring a nearly all-Black cast could succeed on the scale of other Marvel movies. It did, and so has its sequel. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which arrived in theatres less than a month ago, is already among the highest-grossing films of the year. Angela Bassett, who stars in the “Black Panther” movies as a powerful queen, has been here before. In 1996, the New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als profiled Bassett shortly after another of her underestimated movies, “Waiting to Exhale,” became one of the biggest hits of the holiday season. Bassett, Als observed, “is an anomaly in an industry that for the past hundred years has been persistent in its construction of the black girl as Something Freaky or Something Else.” The article traces Bassett’s ascent from her childhood, in a Florida housing project, to the Yale School of Drama, and through her roles in “Boyz N the Hood” and, in an Oscar-nominated turn, as Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” That level of achievement, Als writes, stems partly from Bassett’s delivery of a Blackness “palatable” to white audiences; the piece examines her stardom in the context of predecessors including Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, and Whoopi Goldberg. As Bassett navigates that history, and the biases of Hollywood and moviegoers, she “redefines,” Als writes, “what a black diva is.” | 
