Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when those settings are rooted in the past, like Star Wars. Octavia Butler wrote science fiction that included aliens with dreadlocks. Nalo Hopkinson writes of a dystopian future in which Black people are trying to survive. I imagine all of these realities to be utterly possible, the same way I imagine that in an outer space civil war, there might truly be a Lando Calrissian. A single Black person in a large storyline, yes. But one around whom the story
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