Teaching Race with Afrofuturism
Myron Strong, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Community College of Baltimore County
When I think about teaching race, I always think about how I grew up. I’m from a small, segregated town in southern Arkansas that literally had a white side and black side of town separated by railroad tracks in the 1980s and 90s. I revisit these memories when I teach race because it reminds me of the complexity and diversity in racial experiences. Race is not always the master status, although it is a major determinant in much of our life chances. Despite living in segregation, I rarely think of it when I remember my childhood, instead I think of fireflies,
the blues, eating wild game, and playing with my sister. Thus, examining race does not mean that society defines every aspect of how one experiences being Black.
I often think the way we teach race is limited. The complexities and diversity of experiences are lost as we look at racial minorities as a monolithic group. The value of our experiences lost in translation. Just looking at the early protest of state sanctioned police violence, read race largely as masculine, pulling on a history where racial issues only associated with men are validated. The mainstream protest messaging initially left women and trans out of the movement. It created a single racial experience that failed to communicate racial realities instead perpetuate a race as masculine paradigm.
The search for a most complex view of Black lives led me to Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism has long used techno-culture and science fiction as a lens for understanding the Black experience by placing Black people in fantasy and technological societies. It places the imagination at the core by providing an alternate narratives and intersectional understandings, often by chronicling stories of alien abductions, time travel, and futuristic societies. It extends to art, philosophy and music.
As teaching tool, Afrofuturism adds layers to racial understanding because you can’t look at the experience without understanding all the social factors that shape it. For example, in Black Panther the main antagonist Eric “Killmonger” Stevens assumes the throne of Wakanda in order to use its technology to arm Black peoples around the world to fight colonization and its postcolonial effects globally. But examining his character means also examining his roots in American institutions such as housing, education, and the CIA. His experience is carefully framed within a long history of patriarchy, oppression, social neglect, military training, and racial socialization.
HBO’s limited series 2019 series Watchmen yields another example. Adapted from the comic Watchmen, it begins Tulsa race massacre, which took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, most of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District, commonly known to as Black Wall Street. This legacy and its consequences run throughout the series with a broad understanding of Black life and intersections of their experiences. The shows centers on Angela Abar (Regina King), who adopts the identity of Sister Night and fights racists while dealing with the decades-long legacy of the vigilantes. History, reparations, family, loyalty, gender, race, and immigration are part of her identity.
Afrofuturism allows for the elaboration of racial experiences but is also effective in the way race can nuanced. I use it in my classes and find that students have a more robust and complex understanding of wide-ranging experiences. It also encourages us to take a broader interdisciplinary approach and creates a path of discussion for all people of color. Sociology needs to continue to adapt challenge old paradigms while integrating approaches with people of color at the center.