Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Read Online Free PDF

point in history, just as monarchies challenged Galileo on his Earth-revolving-around-the-sun theory, scientists and profiteers argued about just who was human and who was not. A color-based, sex-based hierarchy was formed largely to regulate who had access to the world’s resources and rights of self-determination and who did not.
    The concept is a weird one. One of the most difficult ideas for descendants of enslaved Africans to swallow is that at one point in time, our ancestors were not deemed human. This wasn’t just an opinion, but rather a legal status encoded in the first version of the US Constitution. By law, enslaved Africans were three-fifths human. None of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we so proudly celebrate today were extended to women, Native Americans, or anyone who was not a white male. Citizenship rights were only granted to those who were legally human.
    â€œBlack people in America came here as chattel, so we’ve had to constantly prove our humanity,” says San Francisco poet and Afro-surrealist D. Scot Miller. “I’m not a shovel, I’m not a horse, I’m a full-blown human being. It’s absurd.”
    In Steven Spielberg’s film
Lincoln
, there’s a pivotal scene in which radical Republican and antislavery advocate Thaddeus Stephens is drilled by his fellow Congressmen on whether blacks and whites are equal under God or just equal under the law. To convince pro-slavery lawmakers to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, Stephens had to go against his own code of ethics and emphasize that the soon-to-be-freed slaves should be equal under the law and no more. Watching this dramatic negotiation of human status by lawmakers was heart-wrenching.
    Now, the Constitution prior to the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t decree that blacks were aliens, or at least it didn’t use those words. Those who profited from westward expansion didn’t quite say that people of African descent were rocketed from a distant star, either. However, those invested in this new color-based power imbalance did push literature and fake science deeming people of African descent and browner peoples in general as hovering on the lower end of the Darwinian scale. No, they didn’t hail from a planet in another solar system, but they were from another world, with mysterious lands and customs that were devalued and vilified to dehumanize.
    This dehumanization was wrongfully encoded in laws, violently enforced, perpetuated by propaganda and stereotypes, and falsely substantiated by inaccurate science, all to justify a swath of violent atrocities in the name of greed. Humans have used these methods to dehumanize others. The transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow in the American South, South African apartheid, the Holocaust in Europe, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, and the massacre of native peoples throughout the world were waged on the basis of others being nonhuman.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
    British writer Mark Sinker was arguably the first to ask, “What does it mean to be human?” in what would later be called the Afrofuturistic context. Sinker, then a writer for
Wired
, posed the question and explored the aspirations, sci-fi themes, and technology in jazz, funk, and hip-hop music.
    â€œIn other words, Mark made the correlation between
Blade Runner
and slavery, between the idea of alien abduction and the real events of slavery,” writes Kodwo Eshun. “It was an amazing thing, because as soon as I read this, I thought, my God, it just allows so many things.” 2
    Dery identified the parallels in “Black to the Future” as well. “African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees,” Dery writes. He compares the atrocities of racism experienced by blacks in the United States to “a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields