This solidaristic imagination is born not of individualism, but of interdependence, what disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls inclusive world-building. “I am because we are, we are because I am,” goes the South African philosophy of ubuntu. This is more than “accommodating” people’s differences on the edges. It requires

reflected back at us in our institutions and social relationships.

I like how cultural historian Thomas Berry put it when he said “We are in between stories.” The Old Stories, as I see them, include those scripted by colonialism, capitalism, ableism, white supremacy, nationalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy. All require us to believe in the inherent, God-given superiority of some groups over others. They include

There exists a multibillion-dollar Soft Power (Dream) Industry, which is in the business of crafting and selling powerful myths that lull us into various states of zombielike consumerism—swiping, subscribing, and submitting to its narrow vision of belonging.

it is too easy to only blame the eugenic systems out there without also examining how our private thoughts and judgments reflect and reproduce a dominant imagination that values specific lives over others. The first, perhaps most difficult, step toward exorcising eugenic ideas from our institutions is by reckoning with the ways that white

Scientific inquiry, it turns out, is situated as much in the realm of imagination as it is in the realm of reason. This led me to wonder: Why can we imagine growing heart cells from scratch in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives, and even more so in our institutions?

As Brazier documents, city housing authorities and real-estate developers collude to interrupt Black childhood by designing spaces and building barriers within and around neighborhoods that make it hard to play freely. “Black children’s physical and creative movements threaten the hierarchical social order that requires passivity and resignation,”

consider the relationship between restiveness and repose, and how the ease of a small stratum of the global population is predicated on extracting wealth, health, and rest from the masses. It holds a mirror up to the overstimulated, sleep-deprived societies of our present day.

The question we face now is whether we can imagine a world in which social acceptance does not rest on these kinds of judgments. You belong without having to show proof of your fitness or superiority.