Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (6 page)

Analyzing race as a technology morphed into both an imaginative playground for writing for me but also a very practical tool for real-world space-colonization issues that readers connected with. Just as the actions in the present dictate the future, imagining the future can change the present.

The first time I attended a traveling black inventors exhibit, I was awestruck. The “Black Inventions Museum” exhibit was
hosted by the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago's Washington Park, which, a century prior, was where Cornelius Coffey and John C. Robinson tested their homemade airplane during the first half of the twentieth century. It is also the park Sun Ra frequented when he distributed his self-published inspirational handouts on race, space, and metaphysics while formulating his ideas on the power of music. Nevertheless, my surprise wasn't that black inventors existed. I was familiar with quite a few of their inventions, or so I thought: the traffic light, the refrigerator, the blood bank, the ironing board, the modern-day computer (a frequent jaw-dropper), the Super Soaker, the lawnmower. I'd heard about those before. The shock was the sheer volume of inventions, how they span every aspect of daily life, and their impact on the science world. I didn't know about the space shuttle.

I didn't know that Kenneth Dunkley invented the 3-D glasses I wear at every big-budget blockbuster or that Dr. Philip Emeagwali invented the world's fastest computer. Dr. Shirley Jackson is credited with inventing and contributing to some of the major telecommunications developments of our time, including making advances in the portable fax, touch-tone telephone, solar cells, fiber-optic cables, caller ID, and call waiting—all while she worked at Bell Laboratories. Every time I reach for my smartphone, I have Dr. Jackson to thank.

The list seemed endless. If it's ever in your town, please go see the show.

But the show was so all consuming, even the casual visitor had to wonder, “Is there anything a black man or woman didn't invent?” (Of course there is, but that goes to show how extensive
the show was.) I was miffed that I didn't know these people. I was annoyed that when science and technology are discussed, the images of black scientists or inventors don't come to mind. Necessity is the mother of invention, and, historical barriers aside, creation and invention are not determined by skin color. I thought about how empowering it would be for kids of color to know that these inventions were created by people who looked like them. I thought about the importance of the world knowing that people of all walks of life have contributed—and are contributing still—to scientific and technological innovations every day. I thought about the power of ideas and the resilience waged by the imagination.

Part of the Afrofuturist academic's work is uncovering these scientific inventors past and present and incorporating their stories into the larger conversation about science, technology, creativity, and race. Alondra Nelson created the Afrofuturism Listserv in the late 1990s, the first online community devoted to exploring technology and the black experience. Today she writes about African Americans, culture, and science. With her Listserv, she introduced the narrative of hope and imagination and its role amongst black scientists and those who work in the medical field. “I wanted to look at Afrofuturism beyond [just] a lens for looking at music. It's great that there are important figures for looking at Sun Ra and Lee Scratch Perry, but I wanted to push it beyond exploring literature and music. It was about how we can use these insights to think through other kinds of projects, a social science project. For example, how do we get people of color into the STEM fields? Can Afrofuturism, through literature, music, or theory be a way to change prevailing ideas about what science and tech look like?”

Afrofuturists in the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s were wrestling with the latest game-changing technology of the time, the Internet. The Internet connected global communities, was an information portal, and lowered the barrier of entry to commerce. A small-business owner in Zimbabwe could go global, urban American kids could have unlimited access to information, and people with few resources could get their stories told, documented, and distributed with the click of a mouse … that is, if they could afford computers and Internet service. Stories about the digital divide, the percentage of kids of color with computers versus those without, limited broadband in inner-city communities, and lack of computers in urban schools all flooded the media. The urgency led to the creation of conferences on the matter. Between the academic study of the subject and the commercial prospects of an interconnected world, creating equal access to the Internet became a priority for activists and tech companies alike.

The AfroGEEKS conference was held in 2004 and 2005 at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Created by Professor Anna Everett, the conference centered on new media and technological innovation in urban American, Africa, and the African diaspora. Topics included the structural barriers to information technology (IT) access, bloggers and virtual communities, the influence of traditional science education on black youth, hightech racial surveillance and profiling, and effective models of innovative IT use and adoption.

Conference creators charged that the technology and race debate prioritized the divide at the expense of the ongoing
technological innovation in African American communities. “Though rarely represented today as full participants in the information technology revolution, black people are among the earliest adopters and comprise some of the most ardent and innovative users of IT,” a statement on the conferences website read. It continued, “It is too often widespread ignorance of African Diasporic people's long history of technology adoption that limits fair and fiscally sound IT investments, policies, and opportunities for black communities locally and globally. Such racially aligned politics of investment create a self-fulfilling prophesy or circular logic wherein the lack of equitable access to technology in black communities produces a corresponding lack of technological literacy and competencies.”
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Everett, along with Amber Wallace, later wrote a book with strategies to encourage advocates,
Afro-GEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide.

This question of access underscored the dot-com emergence; it became an issue in the rush to fund the next tech start-up in the vein of Facebook, the creation of new media, and the blogger craze. Suddenly, with the Internet, the cost to reach an audience, sell services, and post information was minimized. Moreover, the use of technology, particularly social media in African American households, outmatched the general population. Over a quarter of all Twitter users in the United States are black.
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Yet capitalization of tech businesses remains an issue. How could these tools be used to level the playing field? The quest for the answers continues. Although these issues are weighted in practicality, art and literature created in Afrofuturistic veins were obvious inspirations for present-day social change, technology, and the reenvisioning of the future.

Not surprisingly, the Internet and today's technology are actually pushing the ideas in Afrofuturism forward. Gamers, app creators, start-up tech companies, inventors, animators, graphic artists, and filmmakers have faster and cheaper tools at their disposal to use to build and share with the world. The ideas that generate these creations are shared instantly on social media. “I think the movement has evolved,” says Stacey Robinson, artist and Afrofuturist, who uses principles of sacred geometry to guide his work. He says, “The technology was the catalyst. I would say it's ironic that technology would forward Afrofuturism. We've talked and theorized about it, but now we can talk to people who feel the way that we do. We can examine the past and theorize the future. Back in the day it would have been Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois dominating the conversation on race. But now, someone on the Internet whose name you don't know with an online alias can contribute. I think that's Afrofuturism, that you can recreate a persona online and reinvent yourself with more ease and explore yourself. We're learning about black scientists who are doing things that we have theorized about—inventing things that we have explored and theorized about in our childhood.”

J
azz ingenue and Afrofuturism's founding pillar, eccentric jazz artist Sun Ra, sent an artist-in-residence request to NASA shortly after the dawn of the space age and was rejected. Sun Ra, an Alabama-born musician who claimed Saturn as his mythical home, believed that music and technology could heal and transform the world. He was spellbound by the possibilities of space travel and electric technology. But ideas never die. A half-century later, a pop artist with tech love and Afrofuturistic sensibilities would create a song that Martians could hear.

Hip-hop producer and Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am has countless musical honors, but none can trump when he debuted “Reach for the Stars” on Mars. “Why do they say the sky is the limit when I've seen the footprints on the moon?” will.i.am sings.

It was the first-ever-planet-to-planet music broadcast in the solar system. In commemoration of the historic landing of NASA's Mars rover
Curiosity
, on August 28, 2012, the song was beamed from Earth to Mars and back—a round trip of some 330 million miles—to an audience of students and scientists at a laboratory in Pasadena, California. Then it was beamed back and played on the Red Planet itself.

The song transmission was will.i.am's idea. NASA administrator Charles Bolden called will.i.am to brainstorm ways to promote NASA to teens. When the artist suggested creating a song aired from the planet, officials asked who would write it.

“I was like, ‘Are you guys for real? I'll write the song!' ” will.i.am recalled.
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Blending traditional musical instruments with the best in beat-making technology, the four-minute song features a forty-piece orchestra matched with techno beats. “This is about
inspiring young people to lead a life without limits placed on their potential and to pursue collaboration between humanity and technology,” will.i.am said. He hoped that the song would transcend time and culture.

A longtime science lover, will.i.am advocates for STEM Centers, interdisciplinary schools focused on science, technology, engineering, and math, and he's on a mission to inspire children to recognize the technologies around them and use creativity, science, and art to change their environment. “Science and technology [are] already a part of popular culture,” will.i.am told a reporter shortly after the broadcast. “The world of STEM hasn't found a way to remind people that iPod and iPad and all the code that makes Twitter and Facebook work all comes from people who have an education around STEM,” he said.

“I don't want my neighborhood to continue to be the way it was twenty years from now,” he said. “All it takes is one kid, one kid from Boyle Heights, to be Mark Zuckerberg, and my neighborhood's changed forever.”
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But will.i.am isn't the only musician working with NASA. CopperWire, an Ethiopian hip-hop group tapped the nation's scientists to collect sonified light curves, or sounds from stars, that they're mixing in their new app. In April 2012 the group debuted their album
Earthbound.
Raising funds on Kickstarter, a popular crowd-sourcing site, the group's accompanying app will also include an augmented reality space-flight game, an interactive art widget and comic book, unreleased songs, artwork, and playable instruments.

“The idea of making music from a galactic perspective gives you the opportunity to make up an entire world for sound to exist in,” says Burntface, the CopperWire member who's also the 3-D
modeler and graphic designer behind the group's Phone Home remix Android app.
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The app's algorithms can generate two million variations of the song based on any ten-digit phone number.

Afrofuturists value universal love, reinterpret sound and technology, and echo beauties of a lost past as the essence of a harmonious future. While the music is full of mind-benders, with the new era of technology, sounds can literally go beyond the stratosphere. Always ahead of the curve, Afrofuturist music embodies the times while literally sounding out of this world. Listen to Sun Ra's “Astro Black,” Lee Scratch Perry's “Disco Devil,” Brides of Funkenstein's “Mother May I?,” an X-ecutioners live DJ show, “Drexciya's 2 Hour Mix—Return to Bubble Metropolis” by VLR, and “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph” by Flying Lotus and you too might feel like you've been sailing on a black ark from a distant star.

But the music is about more than good vibes. Physicist and musician Stephon Alexander revealed in a TED talk that jazz legend John Coltrane's song “Giant Steps” was an aural and physical diagram of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Alexander stumbled upon a diagram by Coltrane and realized it plotted out geometrical theories of quantum gravity and matched the notes and chord changes in the song. The discovery sparked other research on the parallels between music and quantum physics, and Alexander and his team learned that the Western scale of music also resembles the double helix of DNA.