Race Against Time: Afrofuturism and Our Liberated Housing Futures

Abstract

Class oppression and institutional racism are reinforced by the union between time, temporality, and the law, and yet, these areas are underexamined in critical writing in legal discourse. These relationships play a daily and crucial role in how Black people—particularly those standing at the intersections of marginalized identities of gender and class—are valued, treated, punished, or underserved by and within the legal system. Closer attention paid to the temporal structures, times, and rhythms of the law and legal systems can inform legal perspectives, legal rights, and the impact of future law-making on poor and historically-marginalized communities in very real, practical, and specific ways. To go even further, I argue that utilizing Afrofuturist tools and ways of viewing time can reconfigure our assumptions of space, time, and justice, to construct law and policy solutions that facilitate equitable access to the temporal domain of the future for communities and people typically denied that access.
 After introducing some examples of law and time’s convergence, I reflect briefly in Part II on how temporal inequalities and systemic temporal inequities are constructed through law and policy to have a disparate negative impact on Black people and communities. In Part II, I consider the temporalities of redevelopment in marginalized communities, where time is condensed, public memory is erased, community temporalities are disrupted, and access to temporal domains of the future are foreclosed or proscribed by government entities. In Part III, I highlight some directions and hopes for the future(s), including Afrofuturistic policy advocacy tools and approaches that work to extend, preserve, expand, and protect community time and space. Afrofuturism is considered as praxis, spatiotemporal consciousness, and tool for activating healthy and hopeful alternative temporalities in marginalized Black communities living under temporal oppression, temporal-spatial poverty, and persistent temporal-spatial discrimination and colonization of the futures of our communities.