707: We Are in the Future
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Hey everybody, Aria Goss here. So here at our program, during these weeks of protests and sorrow, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, we thought that today we would offer a different way of thinking about where we are and where we might be going. And we would rerun our show about Afrofuturism, which is a way of looking at the harsh realities of the present that at least has a little hope built in. We first ran the show right after a very different kind of violence and very different protesters than we're seeing today. This is back in the summer of 2017, just one week after White Nationalists with torches marched in Charlottesville and a white supremacist deliberately rammed his car into a crowd killing a woman named Heather Heyer. This is in all of our heads as we made the episode you're about to hear all of us wanting to feel some shred of hope. So here is that original show from 2017, It's American Life from W.B. Easy Chicago. No longer one of my co-workers here at the radio show, Neil Drumming and I took a field trip to Philadelphia. We're going to Amalgam, Comics and Coffee. It's a comic shop. It's a comic book store, yeah, and also like a coffee shop. No, no, I got that from the name. Yes, but it's, I think, the first comic book store owned by a black woman on the East Coast. Do we have to add that? I think we do. We're here because recently Neil's gotten really interested in Afrofuturism and there's this whole intersection between Afrofuturism and comic books. The founder of something called the Afrofuturism Network is speaking at this comic store on this particular day. And what exactly is Afrofuturism? Neil's been prepping for this question. I don't know, there's a long-winded academic Wikipedia explanation which I've never even been able to internalize or remember, honestly, if we're being honest. What I like about Afrofuturism is just seems very, it's like this way of talking about black people in a way that's really hopeful. It's just the idea that we would be engaged in the same kinds of things that science fiction writers have always talked about, that we would be engaged with technology, that we would have a future in space, that we would, you know, master time travel, that we would have a future in utopian or dystopian landscapes. It's like, apparently this is about science fiction, that's really just the tip of the iceberg. And the science fiction part is meaningful because while there have been black characters in sci-fi for a while now, there are almost never the protagonists, there are never the ones driving the action. And for so long and so many imaginings of the future and so much science fiction, there were no black people at all, which, as Neil points out, makes no sense. He says you can tell black people are going to make it into the future because they've survived so much already over the centuries. One of the things that's sort of really specific about Afrofuturism that I like is that it takes an account that passed in a lot of ways. It imagines that, you know, black people have forms of survival through, you know, the slave
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