I have been sitting here for at least ten minutes, just trying to decide how to start this essay. And I think I’m gonna have to just settle on my raw feelings…

We’re screwed.

Rumor has it that Elon Musk is already knee deep in building a company town for Spacex and Boring. What does that mean? Well, it means he has bought large blocks of land in Texas which he is actively building factories on, where he intends to build residential homes that he will rent to his employees for cheaper than they can find in surrounding cities, and eventually, stores, businesses and actual infrastructure will likely follow.

At face value, that doesn’t sound horrible. If his employees are being asked to spend significant amounts of time in one area, working on highly sensitive projects that require unmanagable amounts of time, sure, making that easier for them sounds like a great idea. But let’s be honest about what we’re actually looking at.

Control.

Now, I don’t know that man. I don’t know his intentions (i have guesses, of course). I don’t know what he is truly capable of. But what I do know is, there is no scenario where taking employees who are already relying on a billionare for their livlihoods, and relinquishing every aspect of their survival will end in… well, their survival.

If you are not familiar with Parable of the Sower by the great Octavia Butler, let me bring you up to speed. Octavia is widely heralded as the mother of afrofuturism and one of the greatest science fiction writers the world has ever seen. And that is with good reason. She pioneered a new wave of science fiction that centered the experience and artistic expression/vision of the african diaspora, especially as it related to science, technology and the future of humanity. A wave that would grow from being a bright new trend into a powerhouse of a sub-genre in its own right. And one of her most notable works is Parable of the Sower: a then futuristic story set in a post economic and social collapse America, where our society has crumbled beneath the weight of unchecked capitalism and white supremacy and become the hellscape that marginalized people have spent decades warning us is on the way.

In Parable, and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, Butler walks us through the experience of a young Black woman (in her late teens at the beginning of the book) named Lauren, who is questioning and deconstructing her understanding of the world and fighting to transform the ideologies she was raised on into somethin that actually centers the human experience and the earth’s need for drastic change. She actively wrestles with the systems of government and religion and gender and race and asks how to reconsider humanity's path forward. And y’all… it is a life changing experience, even from this side of the page.

The reason I bring this up is become one of the early red flags that we see in the book is the reemergence of company towns. In the face of a crumbling—no, a fully crumbled—economy, massive corporations have begun to take advantage of the fear and instability that haunt what used to be the middle class and invite them to come be a part of something bigger than themselves. They appeal to people who used to live comfortable, safe lives and offer to return them to that way of life by giving them affordable housing, protected borders and easy access to food, water and community. And in exchange, those workers need only move onto their land, into homes they have built and own, and work exclusively for them.

A fair exchange in a world falling apart. Except that is not what they end up being. Instead of small patches of utopia in an otherwise nightmare existence, they become a collar in the hands of greedy corporations who are capitalizing on a crippled economy to virtually, and eventually literally, enslave the poor.

Now, am I saying that Elon Musk intends to use his corporation’s endless resources to cleverly reinstitute slavery? No. At least I hope not. But here is what I am saying: this is not a good idea.

We have been talking about this for years. There is no such thing as an ethical billionare. And a billionare that tries to convince you otherwise is usually even further from it than the rest of them.

This is why I am so passionate about engaging with history, and with literature, so regularly and so critically. It matters.

I wrote an article this morning that talked about the way that our society upholds white supremacy by convincing us that authority only exists in specific contexts. Especially when it comes to our ability to recall and study our history. Despite us knowing that the majority of our official history books were written by old white men with an interest in painting imperialism in a positive light, we are conditioned to not assign any authority to the voices and collective memory of our elders. But elders like Octavia Butler found a way to get that history to us anyway. And they did so by holding up a mirror and showing us how we are headed right toward repeating it.

In stories like Parable of the Sower, you will find such an accurate look at the future we are walking into. Not because authors like Octavia Butler are prophets. But because they were, and are, our memory. Butler was not looking into the future and envisioning what Elon Musk might do over thirty years later. She was looking into the past and begging us to stand in the way of those who would gladly repeat the atrocities committed by her oppressors. Elon Musk isn't relavent here. There always would have been someone to stand up and try to capitalize on the systems that have been empowering monsters for centuries. The goal of her writing was to empower us to notice them.

I am not sharing this as some dire warning about Elon Musk. Because, let’s be real, you are already conscious of the ways he is actively working against our interests. I am sharing this because I want you to take this understanding into your engagement with Black and brown literature. Especially afrofuturism and dystopian literature. These types of books are pointing us to the past in order to hand us tools we can then use to build something better for the future. And if we are smart, we will follow in Lauren’s footsteps and let go of the ideologies and worldviews that our society’s oppressive systems instilled in us so that we can truly appreciate the authority of our elder’s account of history.

If you haven’t read Octavia’s work, I want to encourage you to grab a copy of Parable of the Sower** **and it’s sequel Parable of the Talents right now. Click the picture in the bottom right hand. It’ll take you to a direct link where you can grab a copy on either Bookshop.org or amazon. And when you are done with those, I want you to grab some other titles as well. Here is a list, and I will link each of them below:

• Broken Earth by NK Jesmisin: A fantasy driven dystopian climate disaster trilogy. Centuries after an apocalyptic event, the world has been set onto a cycle of climate disasters that bring humanity to their knees every few generations. And now, all of the signs are pointing to this being the very last time that the world ends. The story follows three women as they try to navigate the end of the world and their very slim chance of figuring out how to save it.
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler: This book is very hard to read. VERY. But it will force you to wrestle with the concept of power and vulnerability of marginalized identity, even when it is accompanied by extraordinary strength. It is about a fifty-something year old vampire who wakes up without her memories and in a body of a child, and it follows her search for identity, family, and ultimately, somewhere to belong. It has heavy themes of sexual abuse and I encourage you to really read the full synopsis of the story before diving in.
• Kindred by Octavia Butler: A modern day (in the 70s) Black woman is supernaturally pulled into the antebellum south, where she is forced to live as a slave on the very plantation where her ancestors both live. Her maternal ancestor, a slave. Her paternal ancestor, the slave owner’s son. She is forced onto a journey of wrestling with her family’s traumatic past, the horrors of slavery, and the prospect of wrestling through the relationships she must build with not only her fellow slaves, but with the boy who will grow up to be their tormentor.
• Beloved by Toni Morrison: Sethe is an escaped slave who, even decades later, is still haunted by the memories of a place she’s ashamed to remember as home…and by the spirit of her baby, who is known only as Beloved.

CONTENT WARNING:_ Every single one of the stories I recommended above is filled with unbelievable trauma. Most of them tackle some form of slavery or servitude. Most of them wrestle with systems of oppression, like white supremacy and patriarchy, which means they are filled with demonstrations of racism, abuse—both physical, emotional and sexual—and devestating dehumanization. They are heavy reads. But, if bareable, absolutely worth it in my opinion._

• If you are not already subscribed to this community, please do so. You can subscribe for FREE and get access to most of my content, or you can subscribe for $5 or $12 a month, which will help us to fund future publishing projects and to continue creating regular resources here.
• If you are already subscribed for free and feel you are regularly benefiting from this content and community, please consider upgrading to the $5 tier. It makes a massive difference in how much we are able to accomplish long term.