Afrofuturism on CBS Sunday Morning: Context is For Kings

I did a talk back in 2021 that explored the history of racial oppression in the United States.

During the middle section of the presentation I flashed up this slide that quoted a character from Star Trek: Discovery.

Why does “Context is for Kings” line up for my post about CBS Sunday Morning’s segment on Afrofuturism? It is all about the way the piece created a new context for the audience.

While there have been many newspaper stories and magazine features on Afrofuturism over the last few years, in many ways, this segment is a watershed moment. In four minutes, it moved from a definitional approach to discussing Afrofuturism to a contextual narrative defining many ways the average American can bring themselves into the world of Afrofuturism. This shift is very much what I strived for in Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism. I wanted to push beyond defining Afrofuturism to consider how the idea reshapes our thinking.

This shift is crucial to the transformation project at the core of Afrofuturism, and it is central to how everyone, not just black people, can benefit from the movement. This segment offered a multigenerational framework to understand how the black experience can be seen through an Afrofuturist lens, highlighting how the search for liberation is central to the black experience. Some of the callouts in the story, from Trevon Martin to Tina Turner, force us to consider how the black experience must navigate tragedy and overcome trauma, but in each case, the idea that blackness need not be defined by the darkest moment of history is central. We should celebrate this moment; it bodes well for our ability to choose a better path for our collective future.