A world that relies on social inequality to keep its machinery running can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves “gifted.”

Today, the whiteness of the curriculum in many schools continues to perpetuate, albeit more subtly and usually without the threat of physical harm, an ongoing campaign of erasure that arrests the creativity and ingenuity of young people. It not only stunts the potential of those from marginalized groups but also narrows the worldviews of those deem

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

The stakes are too high and the stubborn hopefulness of those struggling to re-create this gloomy world too contagious to resign myself to dour pessimism.

These youth are born into environments of state-sanctioned deprivation, or “organized abandonment,” as political geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it.

This is a good reminder that we shouldn’t shine a light only on the deadly imaginations and social orders that are killing us but experiment and play with new prescriptions, visions, and forms of social organization.

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,”

“To be aware of . . . the market of competing dreams is quite important, when we think about what kind of a new story . . . we should be able to tell,” says Indra Adnan, of the political platform Alternative UK. Indeed, we must urgently transition from our current provincial, chauvinistic, and hierarchical nightmare to a planetary vision of human c

imagination is the invisible substructure, the narrative code, that shapes our material and digital worlds.