What Is Afrofuturism?
If you absolutely positively have to time travel as a Black person, you should go to the future
Black time travel is a funny thing. Whenever I go to the time travel place with my Black friends they’re like I don’t want to do that, let’s go get margaritas instead. They’re like why would any Black person want to go to like any point in the past 500 years? Back to segregation? Back to Jim Crow? Back to… slavery? I try to talk to them about traveling back to slavery with the idea of freeing slaves and attacking massas and subverting the system but people are like no that’s not what I want to do with my Saturday afternoon. Also, what if we get caught? We know that the past is filled with trauma and systemic trouble. We definitely know the present is also filled with trauma and systemic trouble—especially right now we need something that will give us that in the future, we will be freer than we are now. I’m saying if you absolutely positively have to time travel as a Black person, you should go to the future. If you don’t believe me, a place where you can a glimpse of a future where we’re actually free is in art from a genre called Afrofuturism. At a moment when we really need visions of Black liberation, Afrofuturism got em.