Afrofuturism 9-9-17

Hello there.

Sorry we're a couple minutes late. Welcome to Afrofuturism Live.

Yes, absolutely. This is. We were trying to get some extra new piece of technology in place, but as we all know, in the future, technology does not always work. So we're still trying to figure it out. Exactly. But we're very glad to be here.

Thank you folks who are here. I am Tananarib Dhu. Hopefully you're on my fan page. So you know who I am. I'm an author and. And a screenwriter. I teach Afrofuturism at ucla and this fall I'll be starting a new black horror class at ucla.

Cool. You've got good stuff to talk to us about that. You've got some good promo.

Can't wait to talk about it.

Cool, cool, cool. And my name is Stephen Barnes, and I am, you know, science fiction writer and television writer and, you know, novelist and short stories and all kinds of good stuff like that. And more than anything else, I'm happy to be married to the most beautiful writer in the world right here, Ms. Tananarive Due herself. Hi.

Karen Simpson.

Let's see, we got hello, Danny Upkins. Hello, Sonia Ross. And hello, Regina and Daniel and J.R. despres. And hi there. Just give us some love. Give us some, you know, let us know that you're there, that you like us. That's all very, very good because it's just this is all about you guys. And we're starting to take a look at things that people are saying and we're going to be talking about things that questions that people have and the things that we're doing to try to make it better for you, to make the show better, make the course better, and look at all those hearts. Thank you. We love you, too.

Hey, Shantae, thank you for coming so real fast. This is a weekly live webinar that Steve and I give jointly. He broadcasts to his page and I broadcast to my page and we talk about various issues related to Afrofuturism, which, in a nutshell, is black fantasy, science fiction and horror, the black speculative arts. So lots of exciting stuff to talk about. But I do want to take a moment to acknowledge maybe some of you are in a hurricane zone and this is one of your last moments of peace, or you're a little bit worried. I'm from Miami, so I know what it's like to go through a hurricane, to be afraid of a hurricane. In fact, I was telling Steve that I heard a neighbor pounding on wood yesterday, and I had such a sense of dislocation because I grew up in Miami, that I thought he was preparing for the storm, pounding wood, boarding up his windows. I was like, wait a minute, I'm in la. But my heart is with you guys in Florida, some of you in the islands. Horrible, horrible storm.

Yeah, I've never experienced a hurricane, but I have experienced earthquake. And we were on a cruise ship once. It was outrunning a hurricane. All I can say is that the terror has to be deep. And we're going to be talking about fear a little bit later on, and we're going to be talking about a very specific. While I want you to take care of yourselves, we're going to be talking about a specific technique to help you deal with fear. I'd also like to acknowledge this very, very briefly that I lost a very dear friend and mentor, Dr. Jerry Pornell. Those of you who know me know that Larry Niven and Jerry Pornell were my mentors coming into the field of incredible import. Only Octavia's friendship was anything close to the impact that these men have had on my life. And he passed away yesterday. Yesterday morning. I heard about it, and I'll be talking about that just a little bit later on. But I just wanted to put it out there, just, you know, thank him for everything that he offered me, everything. He gave me, all the years of friendship and guidance. And it's one of the reasons why it's so important to me to try to pass things along, to try to help young writers and to try to speak the truth. He taught me how to argue with people smarter than me, because Jerry was one of the smartest, most accomplished human beings that I've ever known. And I can't put a price tag on that. Anyway, let's. Let's move on to other things. Yeah.

Rest in peace and best wishes to Jerry's friends and family, if anyone is watching out there. So, yeah, there was that.

So we stay to the end of the show, which is talking about that we're going to. Do you know, what is the purpose of the African webinar to. To teach you the who, what, where, why, and how of Afrofuturism.

Right. Especially as it relates to some great artists, the late, great Octavia E. Butler, who is in the banner behind me. And this week, I'll be doing some talking about get out and Jordan Peale and some of those works that have had a lot of impact on the culture.

And if you're enjoying this, share it. That's how we know that you're digging this. That's the only way that we really know your comments, you know, the hearts and the likes and sharing it, that's how the word's gonna get.

Thank you so much for sharing this video. I appreciate it. I want to give you a special shout out.

And Ross is there and Tennell and Stu Wexler.

Sue Wexler worked with my mom and then. And in the 1960s. And he even knows that crazy German shepherd scout.

Don't you just love Facebook? I mean, the fact that we. This. We have this technology and we can actually sit in our home and speak to our friends, you know, and there are thousands of you out there. You've been sharing it so that we're reaching thousands of people. This is the future. And I can't tell you how powerful you are if you just allow yourselves to connect with that sense of power within you.

Absolutely.

So stay to the end. You'll find out how to get a free copy of one of our books.

Yeah, any book that we've published that is still.

Let's see, let me see these pictures.

They're not all there.

They're not all there.

Are the important ones here Of Us has written to you, and you'll find out how to get that book at the end of the program.

So let's see, what else did I want to talk about? I want to talk. I'm going to be talking about something. I'm adopting a Ugandan orphanage. Just wanted you to know that those are the kids. Those are the kids at the orphanage that I'm going to be adopting. And once again, hang on. And I'll tell you how you can.

You know, help support them.

You can help support that. So let's get into. Let's get into our day. What do we have to talk about?

I had an interesting experience this week. For months now, I've been tweeting about the fact that I'm offering a black horror course at UCLA for the first time. It's called the Sunken Place. Racism, Survival, and the Black Horror Aesthetic. Well, I had to make it sound academic and everything.

All academic, yes.

And a reporter for iO9 said, hey, can I write a story about you? And I had to wait a few weeks because I needed to actually write my syllabus and figure out what I would be discussing. But. But when the story came out, there was this amazing response. Now, first of all, I know a lot of you probably saw Get Out. This was Jordan Peele's runaway hit horror film about a young black man visiting the parents of his white girlfriend. And all of the evil that ensues after that. Well, this story came out, and within five minutes of my tweeting the story, I got followed by monkeypaw Productions, which is Jordan Peele's production company. Yes. And then the next thing I knew, I was followed by Jordan Peele himself. And DM'd from him, by the way. And a lot of excitement from monkeypop, the guy who runs their Twitter was like, keep UCLA woke, et cetera. And really, the article was about the reasons I decided to teach the course. But it has had so many retweets. There's so much interest in this, I had no idea.

Well, it's not only that. And this is where I get to brag on you. You can't talk about. Do you realize that what she's doing is she's speaking about black horror from the perspective of actually being the world's premier black horror writer. Certainly America is. So to be able to speak about a subject from the inside out, both what does it look like on the outside and what does it feel like on the inside? What is the cultural significance of it? And then how do you create it? Well, just as. How do you define horror?

Ah, well, horror is one of those amorphous categories because unlike a lot of genres, it's really just an emotion. I mean, if you had a. It would be like having a genre called happy, you know, so a book that makes you happy, it's a happy genre. It's a part of the happy genre. And it's kind of the same with horror. So anything. I mean, it might be a mystery novel or even Toni Morrison's Beloved, I would argue, to me, was a horror novel. I've heard her say that she doesn't consider it horror, but I think the Artist. It's an interesting opinion that the artist has. And I say this about my own work. My own opinion of my work is interesting, but the opinions of the readers actually outweigh whatever my original intention was, because the impact of the work is really the message. And for me, Beloved is very much a horror novel. I think Jonathan Demme, when he did the film, especially, pushed some of that horror imagery a bit more. So, yeah, catch me on the inside. Yeah, it's hard to watch that, but it's something. It fills you with dread. It fills you with horror. So my course will include everything from those schlocky blaxploitation films like Blacula and Abby. The late, great George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which starred Dwayne Jones as A black protagonist in a horror movie. So to me, horror is those arts which fill us with dread and horror, and that's it, you know, so they can be science fiction. I'm teaching Octavia Butler's novel is about vampires. To contrast the vampires in Octavia Butler with Blacula. Bear with me. And that class will be on Halloween.

Very cool. Very, very cool.

So I'm happy about that. Yeah.

I mean, what I would boil down from what she said is that the reason something is horror is because the dominant emotion that you intend to engender in the audience is horror. That's what they're feeling while they're reading it. Now, there are short stories that are horror, and you close the story and it's like you're still feeling that horror. I personally think that if it gets to the length of a book, that you have an obligation to provide some catharsis. You have an obligation to bring people out the other side. Because if you do that, then if people identify with the characters and then you believe in the world the characters live in, and now you begin to attack their sense of sanity. You know, if it's Lovecraftian horror, you literally attack their sanity or even Night of the Living Dead. Because what happens with the zombies and Night of the Living Dead is that you are violating religious laws, biological laws, physical laws, social laws, everything. There is nothing that everything you think you know has gone wrong. If the dead are rising, okay, that creates a sense of dislocation, a sense of, I don't know who it is that I am. I don't know where it is that I am. And so it's very easy to lead people with. You know, with. Because they're already feeling deep despair and a disjointed sense the world has shifted under their feet. I think that a writer or a filmmaker has an obligation. Once you've got somebody's emotions like that, the question is, what are you going to do with them? What are you going to do with them? Now we have a hurricane in Florida. We have, you know, in Texas just got hit with a hurricane. And there are fears, you know, earthquakes in Mexico, and there's political upheaval. People are genuinely feeling fear. A horror writer is performing a public service. If they take the big horrors, the amorphous horrors, the existential horrors that we can't do anything about, and then you personify them symbolically in a work of fiction, and now you get to go on a ride with a character you empathize with, and hopefully you get to see them Come out the other side.

Yeah, that's the whole idea. I had a tough time choosing. You know, I've written a lot of horror, so I chose the Good House, where I did have some redemption at the end. But I've written a lot of horror stuff, but I didn't want the whole course to be about me. So I'll also have other writers and I'll talk more about the other writers, too. But we have films coming up, so I'm really excited about the course. Thank you guys again, everybody, for showing up and think about the reasons you're here. You know, why are you curious about Afrofuturism? Some of you are artists. Some of you are lovers of Afrofuturism. I know, I know.

What are cause? The thing that you know, my cause is very simple. I want 1 million awake, aware adult human beings. 1 million. And I believe I can do that by helping thousands of artists and fans of art. Awaken to the possibilities of art and the meaning of art. So every one of you who comes here on Saturday and joins us, thank you. You're part of this process. We cannot do this without you. But with you, nothing can stop us.

Nothing. Ain't no stopping us now.

Ain't no stopping us now. Absolutely. It's our cause. Human equality. Everybody who wants to believe in that, everybody who wants to fight for that is a brother or a sister. And we just. We just love you.

I want to take a childlike moment of reflection. The Black Panther action figures are about to drop, people. These are just some examples. Sorry. Of the Black Panther action figures Hasbro will have. And I hear through the grapevine that they should be out soon in advance of the movie if they're going to follow the same. Oh, I see. You like that?

Yeah, you like that, huh? Yeah. Come on, give us some love if you like that.

You like action figures. And there's a Black Panther mask. So Halloween is about to be lit, too.

That's right.

So in any case, that is part of why we do this webinar is because we're trying to harness this excitement that a lot of us are feeling about Black Panther, which obviously is Afro futuristic and what it represents.

And Octavia's got a miniseries, you know, they're developing as a television series. And Nnedi Okorafor has a series of who fears death at hbo. The time has never been better than right now. Can I go to a letter from one of our students concerning Nettie? Sure, but.

Okay, okay.

You want to do that later? We can do that later. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, because it's a really powerful letter.

What. So stay tuned for that.

What the study of Afrofuturism has meant to them. But I guess we should talk first about what Afrofuturism has meant to us and why.

We've defined Afrofuturism specifically as the science fiction, fantasy mythology of the African diaspora. You know, the stories that were torn away from us, basically. Slavery is the process of turning wolves into dogs. It is domesticating human beings. It is getting them to forget what they used to be and defining them in a way that is good for the master. And there was a very specific point in my life. I know that the martial arts were what I went into in order to know how to deal with my own fear. But there was a very specific moment in my life when I knew that this was something that I had to do. I like to tell that story because it ties into fear. What have we got here? Okay. Okay. When I was in junior high school, I was, you know, four eyed, pot bellied, little nerd. I liked poetry and puppies and, you know, just very, very gentle. And I was at the bottom of the social ladder. And I got beat up, you know, by everybody, including the girls. I mean, it was just like beat up Barnes. To get to anywhere on the social ladder. And the worst case, the worst one was this kid named Rudy. And I'd known Rudy since elementary school, and he, like pulled a pair of brass knucks out of me when I was in like, third, fourth grade. He would take my lunch money. He's just. Just a bad kid. And we're in junior, I'm in junior high school. He gets it through his head that I had narcked on him to the principal. And he let everybody know that after school he's gonna kick my ass. So I'm just terrified. And I get out of school that day and I'm walking home along Washington Boulevard. It's one of the major streets in that area. And Rudy and his brother Oliver and their two or three friends come running across the street over to me. And I'm like hunched down, holding my books up to my chest. And Rudy starts hitting me in the back and punching me in the face and saying, come on, fight. Come on and fight. And I'm telling you, I. I was. I was terrified. I could not be rude. He terrified me for my entire school. And. But I. What got me past it is that I. I felt like I was dying inside. That, that we have a mythology about who it is that we are, that we're Men and women that were brave and strong and smart. And every time he hit me and I could not. I didn't have the nerve to hit him back, it started shattering my personal myth, shattering my image of myself. I was dying. I was dying there. I couldn't fight him. I could not find. I fought him. He'd beat me up. If I beat him up, Oliver would jump in and he'd beat me up. And if I beat Oliver, then his three friends would jump in. There was no way to win, but I had to find something to do because I was. It was killing me. It was killing me. So I finally. Something snapped inside my head, and I put my books down and I walked out into the middle of Washington Boulevard and stood on the double yellow line with the cars and trucks whizzing past on both sides, people screaming at me like I was crazy. And I turned around and I looked at Rudy and I said, come out here and do that. And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and he knew I was going to kill him. I was going to push him in front of a truck. He pushed me too far. He pushed me beyond the human place, the place where you play social games. This was life and death. And he looked at me and I looked at him. And he broke first, and he said, oh, man, that nigga's crazy. And they walked away. He never bothered me again. And I knew in that moment that there was a place that they talk about heroes and stories. They talk about moving beyond your fear of death and the power you have when you do that. I'd never experienced that, but we. We tell our children these stories in order to help them find courage. And when I realized that all of the stories that I'd read for courage had people who did not look like me in them, I knew that day a couple different things, that I had to find a way to find that space again without that kind of risk. And two, I had to find some way to communicate to people that there was a strength beyond what they ordinarily feel. And that's why I've written the kinds of stories that I have written that you write the kind of stories that you write largely to work through horror.

Yes. And in fact, our son Jason, who's 13 and a half, almost 14, is developing a love for horror. I think we're going to see it with him.

Yes. Which is very good, by the way.

It's very good and very scary. But I was just explaining to him that the thing that I love most in horror and science Fiction is that moment where the people have been facing whatever the threat is. If it's a ghost, a spirit, white people who want to steal your body, like, and get out, or a space alien. I love that moment where everybody's confused, but they get together and they have a meeting and they try to figure out a plan. They don't even necessarily always know and rarely, in fact do they know. They don't understand what they're up against, but they are coming together to form a plan and that attracts. I love the meeting. I hate meetings in real life a lot, but I love meetings and movies because that, to me, is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that spirit of resilience, that spirit of whatever this is, we're going to overcome it. Because let's face it, look at what's happening right now in the world. Look at the changing weather patterns that are very frightening. Look at our current government, which is very frightening.

We need those stories and make no doubt highly politicized people and the country is extremely politicized right now will lie to themselves massively in order to keep their political alliances. I did a thing on my. On my Facebook page where I just asked a simple question. I said that polls from places, from everywhere, msnbc, NBC, Fox News, all say that a big chunk of the country were birthers, especially a big chunk of Republicans. Fox News said that 37% of Republicans had been birders.

Okay?

So the question believed that President Obama was not born in the United States, was therefore not eligible to be president. I asked people, how many of you believe the statistics? How many of you believe that a large chunk of the country believed this? And I asked conservatives and Republicans only to answer this question. For all practical purposes, I think out of dozens of answers, maybe one person, maybe two people said that they believed it. All the rest of them, regardless of where those statistics came from, regardless of the fact that Donald Trump, who became president driving it with that belief pattern, was screaming out to cheering crowds and the Facebook and other social media was filled with people who believed it and would argue about it, no one would admit that they even believed that this.

Had happened or that they knew anyone who believed that President Obama had not been born in this country. So the denial, denial is so strong.

So it's the gas lighting to strip away your mythologies and then say it doesn't matter, to put up statues to celebrate the people who were protecting slavery and then say this doesn't matter either. To say that none of it matters is to say that you don't matter. And I'm telling you, as that little kid who was standing out in the middle of the street with cars and trucks whizzing past, who had lost all sense of who it is that I was and was right down to just a survival thing, I'm telling you, it matters. This is what we have to give our children and ourselves.

This week was also a special anniversary week for the Star Trek series. And when we think about images of empowerment, images from the future, of course, you can't forget Michelle Nichols, that role that she had on Star Trek. And I know as a kid that was very inspirational to me. As an adult, I found my inspiration. And you had Jerry Purnell as a direct mentor. I had Octavia Butler as more of an indirect mentor because I had already started writing when I met Octavia at Clark Atlanta University. There we are. I'm going to try to center it for everybody. We all met at Clark Atlanta University in 1997. It was a great conference on the African American fantastic imagination. There had never been a black speculative fiction conference like it. So it was a life changing experience for me. I married the guy next to me in the picture number one. And I don't mean Chip. Oh, no, wait, there's only one guy next to me, Chip Delaney. Samuel R. Delaney is next to Steve. Jewel Gomez is on the other side of Steve. There I am. Octavia Butler stands tall and oh, my gosh, there's a filmmaker. And I looked up his name and I can't remember it now, but there's an Atlanta based filmmaker there.

You found him?

I found his name.

Okay, great.

We'll use it next time.

We will.

But we discovered that we were an instant family. And that mentorship from Octavia took place more in her work than in conversations. And we certainly never collaborated like you and Jerry did, but especially when I was writing my novel Blood Colony, I would say, because someone was tweeting about Blood Colony earlier today. And I really appreciate it because it's the third novel in my African Immortal series and it's not as often cited as, say, My Soul to Keep the first one, or even the living Blood the second one, which won an American Book Award. But I really intentionally wrote Blood Colony trying to channel Octavia in the sense of what would Octavia say about the state of our country right now? Because this was written during the Bush years. And in a weird way, it was almost foreseeing the Trump years more so than the future. That would have been the next eight years, which were Obama, because we had DHS and a lot of anti Islamic sentiment and people being rounded up. You had the escalation of the war on drugs that we're seeing under our current attorney general. So I really was trying to challenge myself to see the world as unflinchingly as Octavia did, to strip away that denial. Because let me tell you, there is nothing happening today, whether it's the hurricanes, our election cycle, zero. That would have surprised Octavia Butler. And if you've read Octavia Butler's work, you know this is true.

And if you can grasp that politicized people, it's going to take a political movement to heal this world. And politicized people get stuck where they are. And what moves them is not logic. It's when you're emotionalized, your logic circuits shut down. But what can move people is a direct emotion to motion, heart to heart communication. To not beat people up, not blame them, not bludgeon them over the head with how smart you are, but build bridges. Jerry and I loved each other. And Jerry could not have been further from me in terms of his politics. I won't go into that right, right now, but let's just say that we used to have these running ding dong debates about life and race and things like that. And I realized, and one of the reasons so valuable to me is this is America. We don't have to all agree with each other about everything, but we have to be able to live together. And we have become so estranged that it is hard, hard for us to do anything. And that is dangerous for our children. And it is my belief that what knits us together is our mythologies, our stories. If America told a story about who black people were that justified the institution of slavery. The worst thing about slavery for me in this day is that the stories outlived the institution and the mythology of.

The institution as one that was somewhat gentle, yeah, benign.

And that leads to the idea that we were natural slaves. And so what white people are asking right now is, well, if you're not natural slaves, if you're not these creatures that we said you were, what are you? And I think that the vast majority of them are simply wondering, well, what is America if it is not this thing that we thought it was? If you have a positive answer to them, America is a place of hope. America is a place of healing. America is a place where we can come together and love each other and protect each other's children. But we have to move beyond the past. Then you have to embrace the Afro future that you have to say, this is my vision of the future, where all of our children can be together, where we can love each other, we can live together, work together, fight together, heal the planet together. Create those visions. I've been creating those visions. You've been creating. Octavia, for all practical purposes, gave her life creating those visions because she worked herself to a frazzle. And now it's your turn. There's somebody out there I'm talking to right now. Who is the next Octavia, the next Tanamuri, the next Steve, the next Nettie? For God's sake, write your stories. We need them. The country cannot survive without you.

I was really excited earlier this year to take part in a program in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I got to meet Dr. Angela Davis, being fierce, radical, thinker, mover and doer. And those of you who have met Dr. Davis, and she's about to have a biopic, I just heard recently, those of you who have met her know that despite all this fierceness in her politics, she's very gentle in her demeanor. And I asked her about that during one of the sessions and she had a very interesting answer. She said, if I'm optimistic, it's not because I see the world through rose colored glasses. It's that if the work we've done for so many decades and hundreds of years will make the difference in the future, we have to be able to imagine, imagine a different future, even though there are no guarantees. But in order to do the work we do, however we do it, whether as artists, as activists, as judges, we have to believe that a different kind of world is possible. And to me, that is the power of Afrofuturism. Not just. I mean, for me, obviously, as someone who is black, someone who grew up not seeing myself represented in a lot of ways. I mean, just think about it. It was only recently that you started having black leads on television dramas. I don't.

Yeah, the first one was Star Trek, Deep Space Nine. That was the first network show ever and that wasn't even major network. Abc, NBC, cbs. The first, the first on a major network wasn't until about 2003, I guess. It was Dennis Haysbert in the Unit.

Oh, the Unit.

Yeah. That was the first one where a non white star was in a television. A dramatic hour long television series. And the series succeeded. It made it into its third season.

Yeah, I don't know if any of you were old enough to remember back in the day, but there's a magazine called Jet Magazine and when I was a kid, they used to have A roundup of all the black actors on TV that week. One page, one page. It was like, oh, Diane Carroll is going to be on this show. Oh, Michael Jackson's going to be the guest star on Johnny Carson. That was how few people there were. You could fit it all on one page. And that was not that long ago. I'm talking about the 80s at this point.

Tell the story about Dr. King and Michelle Nicholas.

Oh, right. Well, speaking of Nichelle Nichols, you know, she was on the Star Trek series, and I read a really fascinating interview with her where she actually was very interested in space. That was one of the reasons that she wanted to do this Star Trek series. But after a while, she got a little tired of it. She doesn't go into a whole lot of detail, but I would imagine she felt that there wasn't enough of her character to do or whatnot, except look cute. I'm just putting words in her mouth at this point. And she was thinking about quitting the show. Well, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Actually begged her not to quit the show. And he made the point that her presence on that series was so, so very important to so many people in ways that she couldn't even comprehend. And just think of the irony that I think. I don't know if it was right before Star Trek or during the run. You had the women from Hidden figures, these black women, actually working for NASA behind the scenes. None of us knew because they were hidden. None of us knew. My mouth dropped open when I saw that movie. I didn't even know that people were computers, you know, before actual computers. So I was trying to wrap my mind. But why are they all women? It was like there was like such a. A weird disconnect watching that. But they were there behind the scenes doing the actual work to help us build the actual future, while Michelle Nichols was on the bridge of the Star.

Trek creating a vision of what that future might be.

Right.

You know, so. And if you think there isn't resistance, take a look at the. Go to a fan page talking about the new Star Trek movie with it, with the female leads, the black female lead, and see some of the nasty comments from some of the fans on there. This, you know, it's like race doesn't matter as long as everybody's white. As soon as you change that, you find out that race matters quite a bit. If we're going to move beyond that, we have to go through a period where we're willing to stand up and actually acknowledge that the problems exist. That if you don't acknowledge the problem exists. You cannot fix it. So that's. You know, I was willing to give my life for that because I wanted to save some other little boy from having to walk out in the middle of the street because he didn't have a father to tell him that bullies are just as scared as you are. And I didn't have that. So I had to write that in my stories and make sure to fight to make sure that there was somebody who looked like me on the COVID so the next Steve Barnes would not have to go through all of that. It's important. If Dr. Martin Luther King and Angela Davis both agree that our visions, our fantasies are important, then if you're creating art, let us guide you. And if you. If you just appreciate art. No. Understanding the connection between art and consciousness and culture and how to support artists as a way of furthering the ideas that you care about is critical.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I see a comment here on my page from David Ellis Dickerson saying that he hopes the Afrofuturism course considers the work of Janelle Monae. Now, I have been teaching Afrofuturism at ucla. I guarantee you Janelle Monae is a part of that course. And you're absolutely right, David, because Afrofuturism, and thank you for bringing that up, not only includes movies and literature, but it includes music. Artists like Janelle Monae, artists like George Clinton, Erykah Badu. There are great many artists who have been similarly influenced by a fascination with space. I just read today that Andre 3000 is about to be in a science fiction movie.

Oh, cool, cool, cool. You know, it's a matter of what we did was we took Tananari's class at ucla, and then we took everything that I've learned from working with Larry and Jerry, and I've been teaching in my classes in one way or the other. We put together a package. We'll talk about that more later on. But what we want right now is to address the concerns that you guys have. You show up here on Saturday, you have questions, and we want to deal with this stuff whether you are an artist or an ally, whether you're black or white, whether you're male or female, whether or not you want to take these ideas and apply them to some other cause. Great. What we're hoping you're going to do is see what it is we're talking about and figure out this is how I can connect this to me.

I want to take another moment real fast. Please go back to get out that great Jordan Peele film because it has reached well over $100 million right now. It's the most profitable, I think, black life film ever made.

It may be the most. One of the most profitable indie horror films ever.

Yeah. And here's the thing that's so interesting about it, because I was just interviewed on a podcast and this was a white horror lover podcast, and we had a conversation about Get Out Steve. And I saw it in a movie theater that was majority white. And I was a little nervous. You know, I could see where it was going. It was headed in a direction where the white family, which, if you haven't seen the film on the surface.

Yeah, you may. You may want to. You may want to.

No, no, no. I'm not going to give a bad spot.

Okay.

But let's just say that on the surface, it's sort of about running into that kind of surface liberalism where people sort of give lip service to having a tolerant position.

I would have voted for Obama three.

Times, you know, but then you face the microaggressions when you get there. How long have you guys had this thing, you know, that's like that.

Is it true what they say about these people?

Yeah. So anyway, but it turns out to be way, way, way worse than that. And that's all I'll say. And I was a little worried that, you know, the majority white audience would not get behind this and would feel it, but really it was surprising. The film seems to cut through all of that so that viewers are electrified by it and they don't have any trouble empathizing with the black male lead who is in this unfamiliar situation.

No specificity is universality. All they have to do is show that this is a guy who is. He's smart, he is caring, he wants love, he wants respect. Every time you simply show your heart or show the heart of a character, you can humanize a mountain, an avalanche, a forest fire, let alone a person of another skin color. When you go into the heart of your character, you are inviting the reader to make a heart to heart connection. And so therefore the audience. What Jordan Peele did in get out was he took a massive amount of social pain and fear. The fear from a black point of view, I think, is, is it possible that even my allies are my enemies?

Right.

Okay.

From the white fear, anywhere that's safe.

And I think that the white fear is, is there any way that we can ever move past the distrust? If this is how black people are feeling, and I can see why they feel that way, what do we need to do so. We have this fear that we can never connect with each other.

And a movie like get out and Other Works Horror is especially effective, I think, with social messaging like we saw with Night of the Living Dead. But a work like get out, and I'll add Night of the Living Dead give sort of visual touchstones to help us see the world that we're living in, but through metaphor. I mean, obviously no one's gonna act like the people and get out. And there aren't any zombies yet. But would you say that Afrofuturism is a. Okay, anyway, what was I saying? So those kinds of films give us an opportunity to air out that poison, that deep, deep poison that's in our culture and offer opportunities for conversation about.

It and also within yourself. I mean, to be able. Art is self expression. It's expression of the deep self, of what it is that you really are. So you need courage to be able to be willing to speak your truth. You know, I talked about the fact that my mother said, you know, Steve, if you let white people see how smart you are, they will kill you. Okay. My mother said that to me at the age of 10, that if there's a part of me that believes that, how can I possibly tell the truth in my heart? How can I possibly do my best in school? How can I possibly climb the ladder of success if there's some part of me that is afraid that if I just let the world see who it is that I am, I'm going to be killed?

And if you're killed, is it even for anything? Does art even matter? Which brings us to that point about Nnedi Okorafor's work that you wanted to bring up earlier, because absolutely, art does matter. And we have proof right here. Because based on our previous telecast, you know, we do this every week. We got a wonderful note from a.

Woman, one of our students, one of.

Our students who's taking our courses.

She tells us that it was Ginny Underwood. Hi, Jenny. And she says, we were talking about Nnedi Okorafor. She said, I love her work. Reading Lagoon now would also highly recommend who Fears Death? It's a difficult read, angry, violent, and unrelentingly grim, but touched upon themes that I, as an American, never see discussed. What I said to her was that Nettie knows her hereditary culture, something ripped away from the children of slaves. This is why Afrofuturism is so critical. She said that she liked what I said. I redicate the witch to my kids. We don't know where in Africa their ancestors were from. But at least it gives them some picture of West Africa as an actual place instead of some homogenized dark continent. What I said, you have to do two things. One, you have to connect your children to Africa. Make them see that as one thread of a vast world tapestry. Second, help them connect to the strength within them so they feel connected to the divine. Do these two things and you have undone centuries of damage.

Yes.

So what she said was that her 10 year old was watching parts of the Afrofuturism class and already wants to write when she grows up. Thank you and Tananarib Dhu for helping me teach my family. And all I want to say, Jenny, is thank you for caring. Thank you, thank you, thank you that anything we can do to help that process, we're here for you. All you guys have to do is leave a note over on the life writing page about how you feel about what it is that we're doing, send us notes, and we will address it in these conversations and we will help you in any way we possibly can. If you would like us to have that kind of connection to you guys, come on, give me some, give me some likes. Give me some hearts right now. So I can see that you can feel that.

And if you felt the power of art in your life, especially Afrofuturistic art, to give you hope in times when maybe you're feeling hopeless. Whether it's dystopia to try to push.

Us, I'm getting hard.

Dystopia pushes us away. A lot of Octavia's work was trying to steer us away from the iceberg. And then there's other work that just inspires us. So. And I love watching my students at UCLA light up when they see a film like Kumzi Wanuri Kahiyu, the Kenyan director, or they read Nnedi Okorafor. I sneak a couple of my own stories in there too. And it really is so much fun to watch people get electrified. And we want to find a way to share that it is with all of you.

And this is. We want a critical mass. We want to do a critical mass of people who are artists and who understand art, understand the importance of art and the actual conversation. It's part of the human conversation. Storytelling made us as a species. We can mold ourselves with storytelling. It is. There's a feedback loop between the one and the other. Whether you're a creator, whether you're an artist, it does not matter. And I just, you know, I cannot say how important this stuff is. And why it is that we've been willing to give our lives and put so much of our lives into this, this process.

So do you all mind if we take a couple minutes just to tell you a little bit about something special we put together for you about Afrofuturism in a way that can help deepen your understanding of it and maybe pass that on to your kids or to your nieces and your nephews.

You know, I see the.

The hearts.

Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Because we cannot do this without you. That's. That's the truth. We're doing everything we can to. We're going to do everything we can every week. And all we ask from you is spread the news about what it is that we're doing. And if we're touching you heart, and this sounds like something would be good for you, join us. So if you'll. You'll do that. So what we've done was we. Tananarif taught her class at ucla.

Yeah, I've been teaching and I've taught it about four different quarters.

And then we did an online version, right?

We did an online course a few months ago.

Yes, it was. And we had a bunch of people and they absolutely loved what we were doing. They said it was excellent. You can go to afrofuturismwebinar.com and see some of the testimonials and comments from people.

So basically what the course was was a lot like this. We would start with a lecture portion where we would talk about whatever the assigned homework was that does have homework, this does not. And at the end, we would have a guest artist come in. And the first week's artist was Cheo Hadari Coker, the showrunner for Luke Cage. Luke Cage, which is about to drop for season two. And yeah, we bring it like that because we were fortunate enough. We know a lot of writers, we live in Hollywood. We were fortunate to meet a lot of people. So director Reggie Hudlin, the producer of.

Django Unchained, and we had Nnedi Okorafor on there. And we had. Who else did we have?

We had Nilo Hopkinson absolutely wonderful Afrofuturist writer.

And, you know, just so every week we had a different. We had a different lecture with a different guest, you know, guest star, guest speaker. And we recorded all of this in all 10 weeks of it. We're dealing with. With music. Film.

Flight. Get Out. Is it one of the films?

Every week you're gonna watch a movie, you're gonna. You're gonna read a story, you're gonna read a piece of a book.

The Brother from Another Planet.

We did. We did it all so that by the time you're finished with this, you will be an expert on Afrofuturism. You'll be able to hold your own in any conversation. You'll understand what it is now. It is, it's. It's was. It's 10 weeks and it's fantastic. And if you took this class at ucla, it would cost.

It would cost about twelve hundred dollars at ucla. This is a. You can't see it here as well. I can't get it on both at the same time. But in any case, this is just a visual rendering. Oh, how funny how physics works. This is just a visual rendering of how the course would look if it were books.

It's all digital downloads and it's all digital downloads.

So once you join the course.

Yeah. You'll get.

Every week you get a new lecture and a new set of homework.

That's right.

And you take it in your own time. If you don't have time to finish that week, then you put it off and you finish the next week. Unlike my UCLA students, you don't get downgraded for not keeping up with the coursework, so you can do it on your own.

So we did that. And it's so much. And because we're peering into the culture, I mean, once you start learning how to decode the messages and art, you're going to start understanding how the culture is put together. And some of that stuff is stressful. It's stressful for artists. It's stressful for, you know, for the. For the fans, the readers. And so we. It's important that you learn how to turn stress into power. Stress. Fear is your body giving you a message about running or fighting.

So the reason we're telling you this is that in addition to the 10 a week Afrofuturism course course, we're throwing in an emotional care package for social justice warriors. Yes, we are taking control of that name, Social justice warriors.

We're taking back the term social justice warriors.

Okay. Please call me that. I'm not insulted by that.

Throw me in the briar patch.

And this is a package for whether or not you're an artist. It helps you regroup, it helps you sleep. There's a great MP3 Steve recorded called Blue your sleep, which is help you.

Go to sleep based on some ancient technology. I'm really into finding ancient technologies and putting them back together again for modern people, especially the children of the diaspora, whose indigenous Technologies were ripped away from them.

Do you want to tell them about the Enneagram?

We'll tell them about that next. Show me that if you got that picture.

I don't know that I have.

You don't know that he's got that picture. Okay, so the truth about the. The. What do you call that? Ancient. Oh, you do? Okay, the thing about ancient technologies, I searched for this stuff when I was younger, and I. I said to God I would go anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat to see real magic. And real magic for me was even let me see a cigarette ash burn backwards and make a Lucky Strike. You know, that's going to be real magic for me. Well, a story I will tell you another time took me close enough to that line that I said, okay, God, you know that promise I made? Let's cancel that deal.

Without going into detail, I based my scariest novel, the Good House, on that story.

Yeah, on the story. Something that actually happened. But along that path, I came to realize that there really were technologies. And I promised you one for free. That had to do with fear. That one is you simply sit with your eyes closed and you visualize a glass tube filled with water. And there's glitter suspended in the water. And you just wait for the glitter to settle to the bottom. It took me about three weeks to get that visualization right, but when I did, it dealt with fear for the rest of my life. There are answers. And one of the magical things, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There's this thing called an Enneagram. Some of you have seen this symbol, usually in connection with the Enneagram of personality. You know, there's different personality types arrayed around the outside edge of the symbol. Then you look at the connecting lines. Here's what I want to tell you. The Enneagram of personality is about 1% of what this is. What it really is is a paper computer that demonstrates personal process in a dynamic sense. The truth of it is generally only taught in oral teachings. I learned this from a Sufi friend of mine and one of the readers. One of the. One of the. Our students asked, if you're going to help us learn how to write, you're going to help us learn how to actually be writers and artists. How do you market your material once you've created it? How do you market it? Now, this ties in with a conversation that I had in a completely different context with a lady who's about five times as successful as a hypnotist. Than most hypnotists. And we created a package for that. And as part of that package I said, listen, I would like to create something that has to do with how do you make money ethically? How do you make money honestly? What is the African principle about mutual benefit and welfare within the community?

Cooperative economics. Is that Kwanzaa principle? Ujama.

Ujama the principle. In other words, if you are creating a product or service that is of value, then you have an obligation to share it with your community. The fear that artists go through that stops you from marketing your stories, your paintings, whatever you is an emotional thing. It has to do with. You don't really believe that it's a value. Well, I talked my teacher, who I got these things from 25 years ago, into creating a mini course on how to spiritual using that enneagram symbol. How to actually focus your mind and your heart. If this is. This is Afro futuristic technology, this is not normal Wakanda. And there is. There's nothing like it. And I couldn't even put a price tag on it.

So is that a part of our care?

It is part of the care for social justice words. How to your business, your livelihood, your art, your writing, how to market it, make money in an ethical, honest sense. And we're using really advanced technology with this. There's nothing like it. We've included that. And I couldn't even put a price on that. But I would say it's got to be worth at least $100.

So you've got the 10 week Afrofuturism webinar with all those great artists, film, literature and music of Afrofuturism. You have the social. The care for social justice warriors. And just because we love you guys so much and we want to share our storehouse with you, we also have a six week course that we did last year that is also. That is social justice writing which also had the lectures. We started out with Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th and broke that down. And we also would have guests every week.

This is more designed for people to actually do the work. People who actually want to create art. So the Afrofuturism class is for everybody, fans and creators. The revolutionary writing course is specifically for people who want to create. And this is where all of my experience working with Larry Niven and Jerry Pornell, all of Tananari's experience teaching, teaching writing at UCLA and in Florida just in it at.

All over. So it's how to use. It's how to use theme in Georgia. What were you Teaching Spelman cob. It's how you use theme. It's how you write the other. Maybe you're not a person who's of color, but you want to write more protagonists of color. How do you do that? Or someone who's just different from you. All kinds of questions about writing for social justice, writing relevant fiction that's in our social justice writing course. And on top of that for writers, we also have a 90 minute webinar which is just a straight lecture on the three biggest mistakes new writers make. The three biggest mistakes new writers make, just to sort of cut through the. The most common mistakes that we see in our writing students that we've had over decades at this point.

I mean, the question is, see, if we say we want to teach you everything you need to appreciate and create Afrofuturism and to be. All you have to do is tell us what it is that you need and we're gonna find a way to include it. And if you. And the thing is, because it's all online, it's all dynamic. As soon as we upgrade anything and add something new, if you bought it previously, you automatically have access to it. So all of you out there who already have it, if you go back into your earlier week stuff, you'll find the new material. It's right there. We're not holding anything back. We're not going to play games with you at all.

So if we were charging what these various courses are worth, between the Afrofuturism course, which would be worth about $1,200, 1,280, the revolutionary writing course is about $1,200, the three biggest mistakes new writers make would be about $200. The emotional care Toolkit. We're just kind of guessing. We call that at $240. That would all be worth about $3,000. And we don't want to ask that of you. I'm guessing most of you don't have $3,000 lying around. But we have a special. So if you sign up for this.

Course, and it's basically because we don't have to have a big infrastructure.

$300 instead of $3,000. Only 300. So it's one tenth of the value. It's right there online at www.afrofield. you can see it at the top of my video. I have it in the caption www.afrofuturismwebinar.com. and again, it is on your own time. And if you order it by midnight.

Monday, no, midnight Sunday. It's midnight tomorrow. All right.

Midnight tomorrow. But if you order by midnight tomorrow, you get that free signed copy of one of our books.

And what else are we doing? Show me that picture from Uganda. Oh, yes, show me the picture from Uganda. There's one of them. And where's the other one? There's the other one. Like I said, I am adopting orphans in Uganda and we're going to donate 10% of everything that we get on the Afrofuturism course. This is their certificate showing that they're legitimate. Okay. The actual. And basically they need mattresses to sleep on. They need shoes, and I'm just going to adopt them. And so 10% of what we get out of this, out of this seminar is going to our little or a little orphan school in Uganda is www.afrofuturism.com. we're serious. Afrofuturismwebinar.com and if you do that by.

Midnight on Sunday, you get the free signed copy of any book that either of us has written.

That's right.

We've been sending out a lot of signed copies of books to our, to our students. And that's always fun.

It is fun, you know, and so if you. We're doing everything we can to both support you and to support the concept of Afrofuturism, which is connecting with the mother continent is connecting. They need us and we need them. They have stories, they have culture and we have wealth. We have opportunity now.

We have stories and we have our history and we have our culture.

That's right.

So it's an interchange of an exchange of all those sensibilities. You can study futurism. W.E.B. du Bois, the great scholar and activist from the turn of the century, wrote science fiction. Some of you didn't know that, but you will once you finish the Afrofuturism course. And we love sharing it with you. So hopefully you'll be able to take advantage of that special until midnight Sunday.

You got a 100% money back guarantee. Experiment with it for 30 days, see what's going on, join our social media group, actually plunge into it if it's not for you. We understand. Thank you for giving us a chance to show you that we're sincere, that we have something that can change your life and change this planet and certainly change our country. And we need that. There are a lot of lies out there about what's going on. We are about what our history has been. You have to engage with this. We need you to fight. Cannot do this alone. I'm willing to stand out there on the double yellow line and have Those cars and trucks whizzing past and die, if that's what it takes. But my God, it would be just really great if a couple of those cars had stopped and somebody said to that bully, you stop hurting that boy. That's what we're doing. When you write the kind of stories, you're saying you have the right to protect yourself, you have the right to be safe. You are somebody, you mean something.

You have the right to be seen, you have the right to a future. So that's what Afrofuturism is about. Whether you're an artist or a fan, like I am with these Black Panther action figures. So we can't wait to share this course with you. Thank you so much for this time that you've spent with us. I don't know if there are any last minute questions.

Yeah, if you have any last minute.

Questions, see if anybody has the last minute questions or comments. Some of them I can't answer off the top of my head. I apologize because I, you know, I don't want to just make up an answer. So if it takes research, I might not be able to answer it. But I see that a lot of you were here. We really appreciate having you here. It's www.afrofuturismwebinar.com and thank you for coming.

Absolutely. We cannot wait to start playing with you on a deeper level. But.

Oh, so David Ellis asked, is black no more a part of the syllabus? You bet it is. So, yes, that story is included.

All right, love you guys. Have a wonderful evening. Go see it.

Oh, yes.

It is. It's the real thing. It's real. Stephen King, I think it's the best. Stephen King, scary horror movie. You know, he does a lot of different types of things. This is one of the best that anybody's done from his work. You take care. Have a wonderful evening. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next Saturday.

Bye. Bye.