In America, it is easy to fantasize one kind of story: that black people should be powerless. The most extreme version of that fantasy played out in late May—how else might one categorize kneeling on someone’s neck for eight-plus minutes with such coldness in their eyes as anything other than a murder fantasy made real?—and ended in the death of George Floyd. Those kinds of fantasies are not uncommon in the US; they are the bedrock of America, the soundtrack to this very hour.
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Impending white doom is a recurring scene in our nation, and to fantasize black death is to uphold a belief in structural superiority. The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade were the consequence of sinister imaginations, as were the killings of those that came before them, and have since come in the wake of mass protest. What can be done? To put an end to one type of fantasy work calls for another kind of radical imagining. The movement of this time calls the nation to action—to see and shape the country anew. It will not be easy work, but it will be necessary.
Fantasy can be an important tool when used correctly. In times of collective uprising and political transformation, fantasy is paramount. Dr. King most famously spoke of “dreams.” For sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany, they were the “images of tomorrow.” Said the visual artist Arthur Jafa: “I believe in black people believing.” It is about belief—forward-looking, uncomfortable, fantastical belief. “The role of fantasy in liberation is huge. We are tasked with creating something that we can’t really see,” rapper Earl Sweatshirt remarked during the first week of nationwide demonstrations following Floyd’s killing. “Building the plane while it’s flying.” The world works to oppress the most vulnerable among us; fantasy suggests profound possibility.
To envision a better world is equally important as the means by which people fight to arrive there. The speculative is more than a reservoir of escape in movies and TV, it is an indispensable tool for us right here, right now: It helps us look upon things in ways we never thought attainable. In literature, the speculative is a language of freedoms—it is about people, ideas, and worlds unburdened from the oppressions, thinking, and mandates of the present. The work of fantasy is the work of liberation, and the work of liberation must include fantasy.
In a recent TV interview, Cornel West said it would take nothing less than “a fundamental transformation of the American empire” to get where we are trying to go. What he was really speaking to was fantasy work. Such a transformation would include an entirely new way of governance and policing. It would call for a collective re-leveling of privilege and power. It would require policies that outlaw acts of racism, both systemic and everyday. It would insist that we practice empathy in place of needless hate. For some, this seems unfathomable. Fantasy tells us it is not.
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In politics, the closest and we have come to this kind of liberatory fantasy work was in the form of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. His policies around transportation and tech reform were lacking a fuller awareness, and he had some race-specific blindspots, but the senator's expansive proposals—taxing the rich and a redistribution of wealth, ending mass incarceration, putting a stop to Big Government—were the stuff of fantasy, which is to say radical and deeply imperative but not easily grasped. Fantasy is a faith of unorthodoxy; it is about believing in a world that seems out of reach—because for so long that is what you were told—but knowing otherwise. “You get to write yourself in,” Octavia Butler said of the genre in a 2000 interview. Fantasy tells us all worlds are within reach.
What we are now witnessing—hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in Minneapolis, New York, Miami, Baltimore, Paris, and London—is the work of grassroots organizing and collective unrest. But it is also the sweat and untiring resilience of fantasy. These uprisings are about believing that the conditions black people are victim to will no longer stand. These uprisings are about believing in what black people have said for decades: We are being hunted, we are being killed, we are being surveilled, we are being caged, we are being erased. For too long American society has run on the exploitation of black culture, labor, and life. Fantasy tells us there is some place better on the other side of this struggle. Fantasy tells us that we no longer have to wait, that we can build a more equitable world, one that includes a sustained investment in all black futures—disabled, gay, trans, poor, middle-class, everyone.
What feels different this time, as opposed to 2014, when Michael Brown’s death sparked a national movement, along with a wave of police brutality killings in other cities, is the level of engagement from a coalition of non-black people. In times of political and social disruption, the work of fantasy says I am sick and tired of being sick and tired and I will create something different, something more revolutionary, just, and imaginative. The work of fantasy is other individuals hearing your cries, perhaps people who don’t necessarily share your burdens or worries, and them backing your cause because they also believe the old ways no longer suffice, even when they benefit from that system.
On Monday, just as the sun sloped into the horizon, thousands of protestors marched in unison across New York City. From my fire escape in Bed-Stuy, I gazed on Fulton Street as thousands demonstrated peacefully, recording everything I could. “I can’t breathe,” people chanted, calling upon George Floyd’s last words. “No more black blood in these streets.” Before long, dozens of people looked on from open apartment windows, joining the rising chorus, banging pots and pans. Cars on Fulton pulled to the side of the road, honking horns in solidarity. I decided not to linger too long. I stopped recording and joined the march. Because this is my story too.