Ruha Benjamin

CAPTAIN’S LOG, Stardate 08-03-2022: Rest in power Nichelle Nichols, aka Lieutenant Uhuru. You now travel well beyond the stars!

A few months before I turned 15, my family packed up our house in Conway, South Carolina, and moved to Majuro, Marshall Islands, in the South Pacific. My parents had been hired as part of a new educational initiative in the country, which had just gained its independence from the U.S.

Once we settled, I discovered my main source of entertainment in half a dozen boxes containing my dad’s old VHS tapes, where I found recordings of every episode of Star Trek: Next Generation. And I was quickly hooked.

Fast forward a couple of decades: as someone who studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, I am struck again and again by scientists, engineers, and technologists who say that Star Trek and other fictional accounts of the future inspired their ideas and inventions. These speculative tales were first planted in their imagination and later sprouted in the fields they chose to enter, the questions they decided to pursue, the dreams they were able to materialize.

It reminds me that the stories we tell (and are told) matter a great deal, and can have real effects on our lives and the world.

Another way to think about this is:

“We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story,” so says cultural historian Thomas Berry. In part, I think what it means to be “between stories” is that while more people may recognize past wrongs, we struggle to live in Right Relation.

The Old Stories, in my view, are those scripted by colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy… master narratives like Manifest Destiny, “survival of the fittest,” and the Doctrine of Discovery. The latter refers to a principle of international law issued by the Catholic Church in the 15th century – a doctrine that gave Christian nations license to seize and colonize any land they found occupied by non-Christians and to convert and enslave the people already living there. Talk about a deadly story of entitlement and domination (and how different it is from Star Trek’s Prime Directive!). Nevertheless, those cast as victims in the master narrative have always resisted.

Just a few days ago, a large procession of Indigenous protestors made their way inside Canada’s national shrine in Quebec City, where Pope Francis was scheduled to hold mass as part of his nationwide tour. He was there to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church in the country’s brutal “Indian residential school” system in which an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were stolen from their families, physically and sexually abused, with at least 4,000 dying under horrendous conditions.

Those gathered in silent protest on July 28 held aloft a giant banner that read, in bold red and black letters, “Rescind the Doctrine.”

From Latin, rescindere, “annul, cancel, abolish, remove by cutting off,” and scindere “to cut, rend, tear asunder, split, split up, part, divide, separate.”

Rescind, not simply regret. 

Abolish, not simply apologize. 

Tear asunder, not simply empathize. Why? 

Because unless the old scripts animated by false notions of superiority and inferiority are ripped to shreds, we will be caught in an endless purgatory: forced to inhabit the same tired roles as we advance predictable and deadly plots. Instead, let us clear the way for new stories! Let’s follow the example of those Indigenous protestors who demand that we smash death-making structures and craft new ones that give us life.((O))

“Chile has a new best seller!” This is how a recent article in Nature described the final draft of Chile’s new constitution. Since it was finalized on 4 July, the document “has commanded massive numbers of online downloads and crowds waiting to buy paperback copies.”

In the Intro to Viral Justice, I briefly discuss this historic rewriting of the Chilean constitution: Consider what began with mass protests over social and environmental injustices in 2019, where Indigenous communities led the charge for a nationwide “reinvention.” Hundreds of thousands of Chileans mobilized, and in late 2021, they elected 155 representatives to completely rewrite their dictatorship-era constitution amid a “climate and ecological emergency.”

An Indigenous language and literature professor, Elisa Loncón Antileo, a representative of the Mapuche people, was elected president of the constitutional convention. She and the other participants posed fundamental questions that citizens of most nations have probably never considered:

“Should the country retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?”

This is world-building on a grand scale with local communities and Indigenous values guiding every step—a process of re-worlding that doesn’t try to smother differences, one that envisions a “pluriverse” rather than a universe, welcoming heterogeneity rather than enforcing singularity. As professor of Africana studies, Greg Carr, tweeted last December,

“The fight to rewrite Chile’s national constitution should be leading global conversations & everyday talk alike. The people have forced a social structure confrontation, with structural inequities and our planetary environmental emergency at the center. We should all be watching.”

Watching, yes, and asking how we might rewrite our own constitutions; how we might even reconstitute the outworn political imagination that carved up the planet into nation-states to begin with… “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens,” the Baha’i Writings remind us.

This week, as part of a new project I’m working on, I have been looking at how artists and architects have been reimagining borders and belonging. I am reading Ronald Rael’s book Borderwall as Architecture, in which he has repurposed dozens of different walls and structures along the Mexico/U.S. border, asking the question at the heart of all world-building: “What if…?”

Rather than electrifying the border wall to kill anyone trying to cross, as presidential hopeful Hermain Cain proposed in 2011, “what if some of the funds currently used to maintain the borderwall were reallocated for the construction of energy infrastructure?”

For the same amount of money used to build an 87-mile stretch of wall between Nogales and Douglas, Arizona, $333.5 million total, solar farms producing 60 megawatts of electricity could power 40,000 households for “energy-hungry cities of the Southwest.” This and Rael’s many other designs remind us to not only critique the world as it is, but work to reimagine it as it could be. ((O))

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Civics of Technology Keynote Address

August 4, 2022 at 3:00PM EDT

On August 4th and 5th, I will be participating in the Civics of Technology “Visioning Just Futures” and keynoting the conference alongside my wonderful colleague Dr. Sepehr Vakil. My keynote is Thursday at 3:00pm EDT.

Even more exciting, in multiple sessions on Thursday and Friday, the incredible students in the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, which I direct, will be presenting the work they’ve been doing all summer as part of the lab’s Tech Freedom School. Come join us!

Click here to learn more and register using the link below.

ORGANIZATION HIGHLIGHT

Each month I spotlight an organization or initiative seeding justice, usually in a locale where I’m speaking, virtually or in-person. Looking ahead to the event above, I want to shout out ColorCoded LA!

ColorCoded is a space that “centers historically-excluded people in the co-teaching, co-creation, and co-ownership of new technologies.” The ColorCoded team utilizes radical imagination to envision tangible strategies for building a world where Black and Indigenous people are truly free, and where regenerative systems are in place with the intention of caring for the land, water, plants, and animals.

Their work affirms that #TechIsNotNeutral and that #EverythingIsByDesign. By facilitating workshops, participating in projects, and building tools, Color Coded is designed to help us “keep our digital bodies safe.” To donate to Color Coded, click the link below.

ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Welcome to Seeding the Future, a monthly musing where I share stories and experiences that didn’t make it into my forthcoming book, Viral Justice. I also shine a light on organizers, artists, educators, and groups who motivate me in the everyday work of world-building.

Together, we grapple with Baldwin’s words, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I’m forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” For me, this isn’t toxic positivity, but a stubborn, insurgent hopefulness.

Subscribers and sowers are the first to know about upcoming events, book giveaways, and free resources like discussion guides, syllabi, and other material that you can adopt and adapt however you see fit! If you aren’t subscribed yet, you can do so here. If you are, I would love for you to share with friends, colleagues, and comrades as we strive, day by day, to make justice contagious. 

a luta continua,