I love the future 🖤.
There’s an idea in philosophy and/of science that we could be living in an “ancestor simulation.” The theory goes something like: if it’s plausible to believe that we are developing toward the the capacity to create simulations so realistic that their (virtual) participants would be as self-aware as we are today, but unable to tell whether their experience was truly real or a simulation, then there’s no reason to believe that we are not, in fact, simulated versions of the ancestors of that future us, who will remember us in the form we now believe is real. I think our ability to question whether we are real and to answer that we are is also part of the simulation–if we could not answer that we are real, we wouldn’t have the self-awareness to make the simulation work. We wouldn’t be the ancestors of a version of us who, at some point in the past, could not yet create the simulation.
Black people are already doing this when we talk about being our ancestors’ dreams/when we talk about death as joining the ancestors. This is practical as well as spiritual.
This short film from the Movement for Black Lives performs reparation. It imagines another us that is made whole thanks to the memory of our actions in the past and present. Watch it:
Taymah Armatrading & Chiedza Pasipanodya as a pair of super cool Black youth hover (literally) at the water’s edge around a future city. I think the water is clean. You hear DJ Smoke’s “Black Habits” and figure out, as one of them asks
“What are you listening to?”
that they share the music in their heads by moving light with their hands.
“Old school.”
“Every time you hear this they gon’ say he made a anthem.”
They uncover a time capsule from us. It’s not a discovery; they recognize it from “the Freedom Summer.” So when the question is asked, “do they teach of Freedom Summer in the year of 2020?” we already have the answer, like Black Jeopardy.
When the ancestor [Mekahel Ki François] says, “we loved you in advance,” that’s us doing it.
One of the coolest things about Black future worldmaking is how we are able to see that what we do in the present matters in ways we don’t yet know.
I see people dancing to “Before I Let Go” as celebration and mourning and in the future, it becomes commemoration. It’s what we do.
I watched those games! By remembering things as they happen, we remember them in the future.
“Call & Response” becomes a relationship between the future and the present–the future calls to us, we answer. So when those visual effects come back? maaaan, listen…
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
— l.h.
“We been knew.” – African American Proverb.