I needed to make sense of the chaos. It was early 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic had only just begun to unsettle our lives. The rising death toll in my childhood community, the mounting uncertainty about my own family’s safety as the virus spread—each moment felt like another weight being stacked upon my shoulders. Confined indoors under strict government orders, we waited for further instructions, our lives suspended, our eyes glued to social media for the latest updates. Like many others, we welcomed certain changes to our daily routine. Before the pandemic, my mornings were a blur of hurried steps—getting dressed for work, coaxing the kids out of bed, and rushing to the train station. Now, our family lingered over slow breakfasts together. The sweet aroma of homemade waffles filled the living room while our children’s laughter echoed down the hall and Elmo’s cheerful voice on Sesame Street joined into the melee. These simple, tender moments became the fragile backdrop of our new reality indoors. Still, as my wife and I juggled work laptops at the dining table, our toddlers distracted by the soft glow of handheld tablets, we exchanged hushed words and worried glances. How long could we endure this isolation? How long before the world returned to the way it was before?

One evening, as I sat alone in my home office, the eerie stillness of the surrounding neighborhood pressing in like a held breath, my gaze wandered to a familiar book on my shelf: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I had discovered Butler’s work years earlier, but now her words seemed to call out to me with renewed urgency. Parable paints a haunting vision of a future ravaged by climate change, infectious diseases, and social unrest—a story that made the new world unfolding before me on the news each day feel uncomfortably familiar. 

Butler’s work is part of the Black radical tradition and the Afrofuturist canon, which is a cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement that blends science fiction, history, and African diasporic culture to imagine alternative futures for Black people. More than a genre, Afrofuturism explores themes such as technology, space exploration, and reimagined histories, often blending speculative fiction with social and political critique. At its core, these works grapple with race, identity, and power, envisioning futures where Black communities not only survive but thrive and lead. 

During the first year of the pandemic, Afrofuturism became a lens through which I could examine the virus’s disproportionate health and economic impacts on Black communities and think about collective healing, resilience, and solidarity in response to these challenges. Over the last few years, Butler’s words have transformed my perspective, reshaping not only how I understand our present struggles but also how I approach my work as a legal scholar, my role as a father of three Black boys, and my vision for our collective future as Americans.

Although author and cultural critic Mark Dery introduced readers to the term “Afrofuturism” in the 1993 book Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, the intellectual and creative tradition of imagining Black futures through speculative narratives spans centuries. Central to Afrofuturism is its critique of capitalism and racism and its creation of imaginative futures where Black people control their own destinies and exist free from oppression. While mainstream science fiction often reproduces narratives of white domination, Afrofuturism centers Black experiences and perspectives and envisions more inclusive societies. 

One of the earliest works of Afrofuturism is Martin R. Delany’s 1859 novel Blake; or, the Huts of America, which imagines a global slave revolt culminating in the creation of a Black utopia founded on principles of Black autonomy and self-rule. It was a radical departure from the era’s dominant narratives of Black subjugation. This early work laid the groundwork for what would become a rich tradition of speculative fiction centered on Black experiences and alternative futures. 

A generation later, W.E.B. Du Bois expanded this visionary approach with his 1920 short story, The Comet, which imagines the fallout of a comet strike that releases toxic gases, decimating New York City and leaving only two survivors: Jim Davis, a Black man, and Julia, a wealthy white woman. In this desolate world, the rigid boundaries of race and class momentarily dissolve, allowing Jim and Julia to forge a fragile, unprecedented connection. However, when Julia’s family arrives to rescue her, deeply ingrained social hierarchies swiftly and brutally reassert themselves. In both Delany and Du Bois, Black characters are not merely peripheral to the story; they are capable of reshaping their surroundings entirely.

The mid-20th century saw the emergence of groundbreaking Afrofuturist voices in music and philosophy that would profoundly reshape the cultural landscape. Sun Ra, the pioneering jazz composer and philosopher, developed a complex mythology in the 1950s and ’60s that blended ancient Egyptian imagery with space-age themes, creating a radical, cosmic narrative that reimagined the Black experience in America. Through albums like “Pathways to Unknown Worlds” and “Space is The Place,” Sun Ra conceptualized space as a site of liberation and transformation, offering a powerful metaphor for those suffocating under systemic racism. His vision suggested that Black people could reclaim their narrative and forge a new identity by looking beyond the confines of the present world. 

In the 1970s, Parliament-Funkadelic’s music and imagery (e.g., “Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies”) further propelled this cosmic vision, transforming space travel into a metaphor for Black resilience. Parliament-Funkadelic’s vivid blending of funk music with Afrofuturist iconography—flying saucers, extraterrestrial personas, and futuristic worlds—presented an alternative vision of Black identity and collective experience, emphasizing freedom, unity, and empowerment through music and imagination. 

The foundational elements heard in Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic persist in contemporary art. Janelle Monáe’s concept albums, “The ArchAndroid” and “Dirty Computer,” explore identity, sexuality, and resistance through futuristic narratives featuring android protagonists. Artists like Flying Lotus, Solange, Erykah Badu, Grace Jones, and OutKast have similarly embraced Afrofuturist aesthetics, weaving intricate tapestries of space, technology, and African heritage into their work. 

In the realm of visual arts, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Laylah Ali have incorporated Afrofuturist elements to reimagine Blackness and explore new possibilities for Black identity. Film and visual media have also increasingly embraced Afrofuturist narratives, notably Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Marvel film Black Panther. By depicting the fictional Wakanda as a technologically advanced African nation untouched by colonialism, the film delivered a revolutionary counter-narrative to Hollywood’s typically reductive portrayals of Black history. Black Panther presented a bold vision of Black excellence and self-determination, celebrating African heritage with depth and imagination. Other works like Boots Riley’s 2018 Sorry to Bother You and the 2023 animated series My Dad the Bounty Hunter use speculative fiction to challenge features of capitalism such as racial hierarchy and social inequality. These narratives do more than critique—they envision alternative realities.

Illustration by Chelsea Saunders

Octavia Butler, who is among the most celebrated Afrofuturist writers of the late 20th century, elevated the genre from the margins to the heart of popular cultural discourse. Her work combines masterful storytelling with incisive critiques of contemporary politics and society. In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Butler imagines a dystopian California community facing environmental collapse, economic inequality, and social breakdown. Within this harsh reality, protagonist Lauren Olamina creates a religious philosophy called Earthseed that emphasizes human adaptability to changing circumstances and eventual escape from Earth to the stars. Butler’s narrative is more than speculative fiction. By envisioning space colonization as a liberatory path, she offers a transformative counter-narrative to societies entrenched in systemic racism and severe economic inequality. Her work suggests that survival is not merely about enduring but about reimagining possibilities of human existence.

Other key works of Afrofuturism have had a profound impact on both the genre of speculative fiction and broader cultural conversations about race, technology, and human potential. Writers like Samuel R. Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and Tananarive Due have further developed Afrofuturism’s themes, exploring everything from environmental collapse to cosmic politics. These works, along with many others in music and film, have propelled Afrofuturism from a niche intellectual movement into the mainstream.

Parable of the Sower is set in California in the 2020s. Interestingly, the book opens in this very year, 2024. In Butler’s world, America is ravaged by climate change, hurricanes, and other storms that loom on the horizon. The weather is so extreme that it has rained only once in the last six years. The economy is one of widespread unemployment. The cost of living is extremely high. Most of the jobs that are available either don’t pay anything close to a living wage or involve debt servitude or corporate slavery, where people live in gated company towns and accept a pittance for some sense of security. Most people live a kill-or-be-killed existence on the streets. Others, including Lauren Olamina, a 15-year-old from a college-educated Black family, inhabit walled-off compounds where their family homes are protected by a thin veneer of stability and comfort. 

Outside the Olamina’s Robledo neighborhood, homelessness, illiteracy, and social despair are widespread. There is rampant drug use, pyromania, cannibalism, murder, rape, and sexual slavery, much of which is committed by people who are desperate to obtain, steal, or protect the basic goods they need to survive. Although the government is still intact, its public functions have largely disintegrated. Vaccinations, public school, and clean water are no longer readily available to the public—everything has been left to the private market, rendering basic human needs into luxury commodities. (For instance, the Olamina children were lucky enough to have obtained their childhood vaccines, and on the outside, Lauren is the rare person who can read and write.) In this society of scarcity, survival demands constant vigilance, cooperation, and the strategic sharing of increasingly scarce resources. 

Robledo is a multiracial community whose fragile existence is eventually shattered when arson, set by mobs from the outside looking to steal resources, engulfs the neighborhood. Lauren, the sole surviving member of her immediate family, is forced to flee into a perilous and lawless world. Because surviving alone is simply too risky, Lauren must figure out how to build a community of people who can trust each other—no easy task in a society where anyone outside one’s immediate survival group is viewed as a potential thief or murderer. The society Butler imagines—a world in which people must kill or be killed—is not one from a distant or alien planet but an eerily familiar one. It resembles an extreme yet terrifyingly plausible version of our own reality, which is plagued by climate-related disasters, economic inequality, homelessness, and social despair. Lauren’s observation that children wandering the streets “have nothing to look forward to” vividly illustrates America’s mountain of despair, a landscape where hope has crumbled for an expanding unhoused population. 

In this way, Parable offers a chilling mirror to the inequities we confront today. While an estimated half a million people sleep on the streets on any given night in the U.S., Butler shows us what it would look like in a world where nearly everyone endures the precarity of street life, where daily survival demands extraordinary resilience. The unsettling parallels between Parable’s California and our own world invite readers to question whether the conditions of our own society should be deemed acceptable. Are we not already living in a world full of the horrors that Lauren endures?

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, my family’s isolated existence often reminded me of Parable. Like many other middle-class families, we retreated into a protective bubble, cutting ourselves off from the outside world to avoid coronavirus infection. We clung to any semblance of normalcy—potty training, coloring books, movie nights, and bedtime routines—amid economic uncertainty and the breakdown of regular social routines. Our experiences bore some similarity to the walled-off existence of Lauren Olamina and her family: the constant vigilance against an invisible threat, the paranoia and defensiveness of our socially distanced world. Just as the Olamina family’s gated community relied on mutual trust and shared resources to survive, in that year, my family became acutely aware of the fragility of our networks and the importance of self-sufficiency. The scarcity of essential goods—everything from toilet paper to medical supplies—echoed the shortages in Butler’s dystopia. 

In both the real world and Butler's novel, these shortages were exacerbated by corporate price-gouging and other practices aimed at preserving profit instead of meeting people’s needs. Outside our home, the societal fractures exposed by the pandemic—racial and economic inequities, public mistrust of government health measures, and the disproportionate suffering of working-class Black communities, alongside other marginalized groups—felt like a real-life precursor to the societal collapse Butler envisions. Though we were not facing roving bands of armed thieves or the corporate feudalism depicted in Parable, the pandemic underscored how quickly social stability can unravel and how deeply interconnected we all are. Like Lauren, we were forced to grapple with uncertainty and reimagine what community and resilience could look like in a world forever changed.

Another way in which the California of Parable resembles our own society is through rampant worker exploitation. In Butler’s world, labor laws have been rolled back by a morally bankrupt president, and corporate greed has been left unrestrained. Workers are reduced to disposable commodities—“more throw-aways than slaves” and “easy to replace.” This dystopian reality is reminiscent of the plight of essential workers during the pandemic, those who were, for a time, hailed as “heroes.” Grocery clerks, bus drivers, nurses, meatpackers, and delivery drivers were among those forced to work under dangerous conditions at great personal risk. While their work was undoubtedly essential, their lives were treated as expendable. Many were denied a living wage, hazard pay, paid sick time, personal protective equipment, and adequate workplace safety standards to protect them from COVID-19. For countless working-class Americans, especially service and frontline workers, the pandemic was another reminder that the rich would continue to grow richer while they struggled to afford rent, healthcare, and basic necessities. The pandemic laid bare the stark inequities of modern society, making it undeniable that, for so many, the American Dream has devolved into an unrelenting nightmare. As Fox Wingate, a Safeway worker in Maryland, told the Washington Post in August 2020, “At the beginning they valorized what was deemed a dead-end job, but four months later they don’t even treat us like humans anymore.”

The pandemic has revealed not only the depth of material inequalities but also the fragility of the promises that underpin the so-called American Dream. For many Black Americans, the notion that hard work alone could provide a ticket out of poverty had long since withered. The struggle to realize our full rights as Americans has always been a defining feature of Black life, as American democracy itself was built on the exclusion of Black people from its promises of liberty and justice. The Black radical tradition—encompassing resistance to slavery, as well as the struggles of the civil rights movement and beyond—stands as a testament to this ongoing fight. The violent society depicted in Parable serves as a chilling reminder that for Black Americans, the American Dream has often been overshadowed by night terrors—haunting memories of slavery, lynching, police brutality, attack dogs, fire hoses, and knees pressed firmly upon necks. These traumas persist in the body and mind, ever-present reminders of lived oppression. In this way, Butler’s work functions not only as a dystopian warning but also as a reflection on the historical and enduring struggles for Black liberation.

The society in Parable, much like our own, is structured around racial and class hierarchies, with corporations mediating these inequalities in their relentless pursuit of natural resource and labor extraction to maximize profits. When the Olamina family gets word that the “upper middle class, white, literate community” of Olivar, a coastal town, will now be “taken over, bought out, privatized” and governed by a corporation that will also employ its residents and fund the desalination of its water supply, Lauren’s father remarks, 

Robledo’s too big, too poor, too black, and too Hispanic to be of interest to anyone—and it has no coastline. What it does have is street poor, body dumps, and a memory of once being well-off—of shade trees, big houses, hills, and canyons. Most of those things are still here, but no company will want us.

The family worries that “if Olivar succeeds,” “this country is going to be parceled out as a source of cheap labor and cheap land. When people like those in Olivar beg to sell themselves, our surviving cities are bound to wind up the economic colonies of whoever can afford to buy them.” These words are striking given the threats of real-world right-wing efforts to privatize everything from public schools to Medicare. Are we, like the society in Butler’s dystopia, on a path to becoming a nation run as a massive corporation, with citizens reduced to little more than corporate slaves?

Butler also frequently critiques the police in Parable, portraying them as ineffectual and corrupt. In the novel, the police charge fees for their services, show up after a crime has been committed, take a long time to arrive, and are largely absent during emergencies. They don’t solve crimes, and their presence is often more harmful than helpful because they lie and steal from the “street poor” and “knock them around” to assert their dominance. Butler’s critique feels especially relevant to the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, when “defund the police” became a rallying cry, and Parable became so popular that it made the New York Times Best Seller list a full 27 years after its initial publication. Yet, despite the promise of the 2020 uprisings, police violence has only worsened. Each year since 2020, the cops have killed more people than the previous, with over 1,200 killings so far this year.

In the wake of this year’s presidential election, some pundits have argued that the slogan “defund the police” cost Kamala Harris the election. Not only is this claim false—Harris ran a pro-law and order campaign, and the Biden administration generously funded the police—but it’s also a reminder of how limited our country’s political imagination can be when it comes to policing. While “defund the police” remains unthinkable among many of the most vocal in the political center and right, the kind of imagination required to engage the proposition seriously—as expressed by police and prison abolitionists in 2020—is precisely that exemplified by Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina. 

Parable invites us to reconsider fundamental concepts like safety and survival through Lauren’s philosophy Earthseed, summed up as “God is Change.” This tenet challenges traditional religious notions of a fixed or static deity, suggesting instead that divinity resides in the force of change itself. In a society where free markets and individual economic success are often equated with progress—framing change as an inevitable outcome of impersonal economic forces—Lauren’s belief in the malleability of change urges us to rethink its very nature. Change, according to Earthseed, is not inevitable or abstract or controlled by external market forces; it is something we must actively shape and direct ourselves. 

This perspective is particularly relevant to the conversation around reimagining public safety. What if, similar to Lauren, we redefined our conception of public safety? Redirecting public resources to address the root causes of issues like mental illness, homelessness, and systemic inequality would be far more effective than perpetuating a system where police interventions fail so many.

A central question I take from Parable is this: will we resign ourselves to climbing the socioeconomic ladder as “debt slaves,” or, like Lauren, forge a new path in pursuit of true freedom? 

As a law professor, I encourage students to brainstorm how Afrofuturist concepts like communitarianism and mutual aid might inform more equitable community development policies. Drawing inspiration from the Earthseed philosophy, I push students to consider legal frameworks that prioritize community resilience and social solidarity. My hope is that such discussions will lead to deeper insights into how the law can better serve marginalized communities, much like Lauren’s quest to build a more loving and just world in the face of societal collapse.

Critics may argue that Afrofuturism’s speculative nature makes it impractical for addressing pressing social issues. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. With President Donald Trump’s reelection, we find ourselves hurtling toward a chaos reminiscent of the early pandemic years—or perhaps something even worse. Trump has threatened mass deportations that, beyond their cruelty, would destabilize the economy and upend entire industries reliant upon immigrant labor. Even more, Trump’s GOP appears more intent on destroying government institutions and gutting essential programs and services like Medicare, Social Security, and public education than on improving the material conditions of everyday Americans. Confronting these challenges will require organized resistance, and, as Parable illustrates, resistance begins with mutual aid and the fight for survival. 

As I navigate the challenges of raising children in a world marked by school shootings, war, and environmental catastrophe, I strive to teach them not merely to endure but to hope for a better future. I introduce them to books that feature Black boys as central characters, showing them that they can be the heroes of their own stories rather than passive observers of the world’s struggles. I encourage them to imagine what the world might become if we collectively resist the forces that harm us—corporate greed, police brutality, and political corruption among them.

In the words of Octavia Butler, “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.” “The only lasting truth is Change.” Afrofuturism embraces change not as something to fear but as an opportunity to build a more just and equitable future. It reminds us that the future is not fixed and that within that uncertainty lies our greatest potential for transformation. The challenges we face are immense, but so too is our capacity for imagination and collective action. Like Lauren Olamina and her fellow travelers, we must walk boldly toward a new future, trusting that each step will bring us closer to a more just and hopeful tomorrow.

Image: "Within This Seed is the Gift of a Thousand Forests" by Basil Kincaid.