Black Futurism: Doubling Down Isn’t Enough

It’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of something else.

 adrienne maree brown

Equity-centered institutions are defiantly and courageously “doubling down” to address struggles that have gone from urgent to existential. But the reality is that those are the same approaches that failed to prevent the current proliferation of domestic and international humanitarian crises. Empirically, we are being asked to go upstream and reconsider our fundamental approaches. Black Futurism provides a framework for practitioners and movements to do things differently in four stages: Unlearn, Re-learn, Socialize, and Implement.

Black Futurism, a largely cultural phenomenon born of the 1970s, expands the scope of many racial equity frameworks by illuminating and challenging assumptions we often don’t even realize we have internalized. In a hyper-specialized world, institutional racial equity work has been “professionalized,” modeling the narrow technocratic approach that has become a hallmark of legitimacy. Coded jargon like “evidence-based,” “results-driven,” and “culture of accountability” means that programs that allege long-term structural change as their goal must instead demonstrate short-term, numeric causality. Meaning is sacrificed for convenient KPIs and ROI metrics.

By contrast, Black Futurism is rooted in art, music, film, literature, and other aesthetic practices that respond to dehumanization in modernity and express a yearning for a new world. Deeply personal, Black Futurism is a survival instinct during the darkest times, offering a way out. It is bold and ambitious out of necessity. In the spirit of emancipation, Black Futurism challenges conventional and explicit forms of racism, while also subverting bedrock institutions and discursive traditions normatively associated with neutrality and progress: science, technology, rationalism, and even modernity itself.

There are already signs that the principles undergirding Black Futurism can be responsive to this crisis moment. The Mamdani phenomenon in New York City, and a recent Demos project, “Toward a Third Reconstruction,” embody the emancipatory spirit of Black Futurism in several ways without referencing it by name. Both examples carry the torch of race conscious work at a time when other institutions are pushing the work underground (or purging it altogether). Both challenge assumptions about how this work should be done and what we can hope to achieve.

Everybody’s Work

Another lesson from these examples is that racial equity is everybody’s work. It is my hope that my background (public policy degree, consultant, White, male, Jewish), and my ongoing work to unlearn so many assumptions about how we work and perceive and live, may make my portrayal relatable to other outsiders.

While a values-based rationale for White people to pursue racial equity wouldn’t typically be considered sufficient or “serious,” that may be changing. According to E.J. Dionne Jr.’s New York Times op-ed, “We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families.”

There are also practical reasons for White people to pursue racial equity work, and for everyone to participate in the struggle against anti-Black racism:

• Focusing on the most vulnerable and least served groups at a time when inequality indicators are at an all-time high contributes to overall social stability.
• Fighting hate in all its forms creates solidarity and sets a precedent that helps mobilize people and resources when other groups are targeted.
• Prejudice is an obstacle to the most efficient use of human talent, compromising innovation, profit maximization, and economic progress.
• At higher levels of leadership, including board rooms, government, and philanthropy, the demographic profile often becomes more white and more male. While there is no substitute for the perspective and authority that comes from lived experience, there is also a tendency for people to absorb messages more effectively from people who look more like them. At the recent Mission Investors Exchange National Conference, outgoing president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stephen Heintz divulged one of his strategies: “Dress like a banker so you can act like a revolutionary.”

On a more personal level, being White ensures that I will misrepresent Black Futurism. But misrepresentation is also universal. Dr. Chera Reid, in a Becoming the Vision podcast episode with Sadé Dozan, quotes Black Futurism scion Octavia Butler: “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.”

Institutional Barriers

Funders and other types of social change organizations often want to “cut to the chase” when they hire me or my team to do transformative racial equity capacity building. I get it. Without exaggeration, everything that has been achieved since the civil rights movement is at stake. This feels like a time for action, not reflection.

The problem is that a prescription, without the opportunity to begin learning how to think differently about these issues, wouldn’t make sense. And if the prescription relied on familiar concepts, following it might feel good from a process perspective, but ultimately it wouldn’t be effective. Think of funders who proudly showcase their “grantee quarterly impact scorecards,” the visual appeal substituting for any sense of the ultimate purpose.

A glossary, providing precise definitions of the latest politically correct lingo, is another common request. But the glossary is doomed for a similar reason. At best, nothing changes at a structural level, or at the level of organizational culture, as a result of semantics. At worst, the stakes are raised for anyone who missteps and uses the wrong technical term. The unpleasant organizational culture that results is exactly what fuels the “anti-woke” movement. And when we take the bait and engage in that struggle, the more meaningful levels of racial equity work get lost.

Sometimes clients are persuaded by these attempts to redirect their initial requests for simple prescriptions and glossaries. What, then, are these new ways of thinking and these more meaningful levels of racial equity? And how (and when) do they lead to greater effectiveness, mission fulfilment, and real change?

A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity

To do racial equity work that is truly different, and therefore more likely to yield different results, Black Futurism starts by making visible the invisible assumptions that we—as individuals and institutions—all make. These assumptions artificially and unwittingly constrain our sense of what’s possible and how we might get there. Once those constraints are seen, they can be removed, and inspiring new approaches come into view.

The emperor has no clothes. Culture and narrative is all we’ve got.

These constraints derive from core values: rationalism, empiricism, and other Enlightenment ideals. If those values are reconstrued as choices, or human constructs, rather than a set of objective and self-evident truths, the result is revolutionary. Elena Vasileva, a futurist storyteller, explains how we all fall prey: “Collectively reinforced narratives rarely feel ideological. They feel neutral, natural, almost unquestionable, which is precisely what makes them so powerful.”

Once you know to look for it, the very specific historic, cultural, and sociodemographic origins of those narratives become apparent. Demystifying (or “re-mystifying”) status quo notions of “serious” and “rigorous” policy making and systems change as a narrative of white history and culture, Black Futurism establishes its standing as a legitimate and liberatory alternative.

This equivalence is particularly important because Black Futurism is itself a cultural phenomenon. The movement’s global ambassadors include Octavia Butler, George Clinton (Parliament-Funkadelic), Herbie Hancock, Michel Basquiat, and Sun Ra.

Without this framing, good people doing important and urgent work often struggle to see how culture and narrative can compete with traditional policy making and systems change work. The emperor has no clothes. Culture and narrative are all we’ve got.

Black futurists boldly assert a fantastic vision of a world where Black people are liberated from physical and psychological bondage, and delivered into a universe that is free from the constraints of modern rationalism. Black futurist Eve L. Ewing combines the cultural and literal meanings when she defines it as “the premise that Black people exist in the future.”

In his “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,” Robin D.G. Kelley describes how artist, athlete, and activist Paul Robeson “took the Enlightenment tradition to task in an implicit attempt to explain the rise of fascism.” Kelley goes on to quote Robeson’s 1934 essay, I Want to Be African: “Mankind placed a sudden dependence on the part of his mind that was brain, intellect, to the discountenance of that part that was sheer evolved instinct and intuition; we grasped at the shadow and lost the substance… and now we are not altogether clear what the substance was.”

In the same essay, Robeson asserts that Black Americans are well positioned to seed change because “they knew the West and its culture; they knew modernity and its limitations; their dreams of freedom could overturn a market-driven, warmongering rationality and give birth to a new humanity.”

The limitations of modernity that are so central to Western culture help explain the progressive movement’s spectacular failure right now, confronted by another proto-fascist moment in the US and abroad. Traditional definitions of rigor lead to narrow technocratic approaches, and theories of change that are incremental by nature and therefore doomed to fail in the context of proliferate, simultaneous crises. Liberals in the US continue to pursue “big tent” strategies to challenge the opposition, euphemistically signaling a capitulation on core values. These assumptions and approaches can be traced back to Bill Clinton’s sweeping and infamous 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and Tony Blair’s “Third Way.” The risk averse mindset repeats itself in the form of “electability” fears that led to Bernie Sanders’ primary losses to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Silicon Valley Asserts Its Own Frightful Version

If Black Futurism isn’t already a lot to take in, a competing version of futurism offered by Silicon Valley tech billionaires, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists is gaining cultural momentum—and the stakes are high.

Silicon Valley Futurism (also known as Techno-Optimism and Technofascism) makes big bets on technology and engineering visions that to most people are unimaginable, or at least unrealistic. To avoid this potential barrier, privatization and deregulation focuses control of these audacious pursuits among a small number of individuals, and helps expand their reach into domains formerly occupied by government in order to achieve scale. Cultivating a narrative of bootstraps entrepreneurship and individual genius (e.g., Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel), combined with thrilling images of Mars colonization and labor eliminating automation and robotics, provides a favorable climate for this process.

The central role of AI for Silicon Valley Futurism, and the transcendent spirit of the entire endeavor, is articulated by Curtis Fletcher, Director of the Ahmanson Lab at USC’s Harman Academy for Polymathic Study: “From visions of god-like superintelligence to the promise of digital immortality, the development of AI is deeply entangled with a range of quasi-religious ideas about the future of humanity.”

Three parallels between Black Futurism and Silicon Valley Futurism belie stark opposition.

• Parallel 1: Born of unprecedented inequality

The fantastic, liberatory vision of Black futurism rises from the ashes of an increasingly explicit racist culture, when existing approaches are failing, the struggle is existential, and it feels like there is nothing to lose.

In a strange parallel, the audacity of Silicon Valley Futurism is attributable to the liberatory thinking that comes from being a member of an exalted elite that is effectively immune to consequences. In his recent Atlantic article, “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” Noah Hawley explains that “for them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.”

• Parallel 2: Outer space

After centuries of struggle and retrenchment, Black Futurism often looks toward outer space for emancipatory possibilities. But instead of the science, technology, engineering, and billionaire culture we associate with contemporary space programs like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Black Futurism combines space iconography with pre-rational Black diasporic culture using literature, visual art, music, and other media to inspire. One example is the P-Funk Mothership, a giant spaceship model that descended amid smoke and flashing lights as a crescendo of Parliament-Funkadelic’s P-Funk Earth Tour, which promoted their platinum album, Mothership Connection.

• Parallel 3: Race

Finally, Black and Silicon Valley futurism are both racially specific. While Black futurism explicitly lifts up the Black Diaspora collectively, Silicon Valley futurism creates enormous wealth and power for White male individuals. At the moment, the racial agenda of Silicon Valley futurists remains implicit, but empirically it is unmistakable.

Is There a To-Do List?

The audacity of Black Futurism is its strength, but also its weakness. When it feels like everything is being questioned, it’s hard to know how to proceed on a very practical level. The words we chose or the actions we take could easily and inadvertently reinforce dominant systems. There is an inherent level of risk that is unavoidable. Instead of falling back on simplistic steps that miss the point or intensifying our pursuit of the false idol of absolute certainty, the uncertainty must be embraced.

A promising direction is needed now more urgently than at any point since Jim Crow, and there are early signs that Black Futurism could be that promise.

That’s where trust-based relationship building comes in. As we grasp for direction, and as we inevitably misstep along the way, trust-based relationships help ensure missteps don’t become catastrophic. The work of Black Futurism is often referred to as “becoming” or “worldbuilding” because it is ongoing and it draws on faculties that by nature cannot be reduced.

In that spirit, the following four stages may be broad enough to help organize this ambitious and wholesale work without imposing artificial constraints.

• Stage 1: Unlearn

Take a fresh look at our own social change work to which we are so devoted, and try to see the invisible, embedded, racialized assumptions related to rationality that permeate all of us.

Grace Lee Boggs, in 2012, describes how even activists have internalized a dystopian future: “We began to depend on higher wages and consumer goods to compensate for our dehumanization.”

Pushing for incremental changes within a broken system can be counterproductive, reinforcing the basic systems of oppression. Making those underlying systems visible naturally leads to redirection.

• Stage 2: Re-learn

Take things like art, culture, spirit, joy, and love that are already valued in one way, and reinterpret and reassert them in a distinctly different way. It is ongoing work to resist the constant and subtle insinuations of a dominant culture (that doesn’t even see itself as culture). Many artists, art activists, art lovers, and patrons of the arts struggle to stay focused “over the horizon,” as Heather McGhee recently describes the work of Demos:

“It was a way to explain why we weren’t weighing in on every political debate of the moment, and why we often promoted policies that had no chance of passing that year or even the next. The expression ‘over the horizon’ also reflected a confidence that we were looking not left or right for ideas but into the inevitable future. The long-term megatrends of wealth inequality and demographic change demanded a next generation of solutions.”

• Stage 3: Socialize

Even artists themselves often struggle to position their own work at the center of serious policy discussions (rather than as social marketing, healthy diversion, or healing). And within public policy degree programs, think tanks, and government, the cultural barrier to creative expression is much higher. But as the left tries to figure out how this proto-fascist slide has happened and what to do about it, there is a window of opportunity to bring genuinely novel concepts and approaches into the policy arenas that we can now see have offered a false sense of options and openness.

• Stage 4: Implement

More is needed, but the work has already begun.

• • Demos, a think tank with a strong reputation for sophisticated and technical economic policy analysis, recently released a six-part series hosted by Nonprofit Quarterly called “Toward a Third Reconstruction.” The contributors, including economists, historians, national organizers, and philanthropy leaders, look beyond the emergencies of today to imagine the next chapter in American history. Demos CEO Taifa Butler’s contribution (and my own) in particular push beyond traditional approaches, invoking Dr. King’s Beloved Community, and Ruha Benjamin’s Radical Imagination, to “inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.”
  • The Mamdani phenomenon is an even more concrete example of the power of unconventional approaches at a crisis moment. Pickup soccer matches and scavenger hunts announced on TikTok by a young and inexperienced socialist candidate shouldn’t compete with an establishment standard-bearer in a contest to lead the largest American city. But the overall spirit of joy, optimism, humanity, and agency, while less tangible, gets right to the heart of a disillusionment and a yearning for something genuinely new. Once elected, the vibe continues. Mamdani’s completely new departments and initiatives, including Mass Engagement, Co-Governance, Community Safety, Neighborhood Builders, and even Emergency Snow Shovelers promoted by more quirky social media videos are, cumulatively, a powerful proof of concept.

While they aren’t referred to as Black Futurism specifically, in each example change makers are challenging conventional wisdom about how this work should be done. Taifa Butler and Zohran Mamdani are modeling how to move creative expression from extracurricular and fanciful to legitimate and central.

Black futurism is a challenging concept. It is ongoing and open-ended work that defies prescription. And the risks, including Silicon Valley’s version of futurism, are real. But the potential rewards right now are immeasurable. Literally. A promising direction is needed now more urgently than at any point since Jim Crow, and there are early signs that Black Futurism could be that promise.