The Future Is Black

The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

Finally, a book that breaks free of the narrative. A book that would make Malcolm X proud as it takes on the misinformation of the white liberal. Learn how white liberals created the KKK and Jim Crow laws and turned dogs and hoses on black Americans in the 1960s. Find out the real motive for Affirmative Action and purging the past. Follow along the exciting African battles in Zulu land and Ethiopia where warriors with spears beat back advanced armies. Imagine a future of a Wakanda-like city being planned in Senegal by music artist Akon! This book has it all.

“A literary experience unlike any I’ve had in recent memory . . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) What does it mean to be Black and alive right now? Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work—images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more—to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging." -- Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post

The Future is Blackpresents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope,of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized. within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

Reflects on black politics in America and what it will take to to see equality.