Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

His precise wording, This is you, works like a portal, beaming Serena into a future where she is a world champion.

One of the main ways art can disrupt the carceral imagination is by refuting the eugenic classification and fragmentation of people—desirable or deplorable, worthy or disgraced, precious or superfluous. Art can remind us who we are beyond the trappings of privilege or prison.

Business as usual is often a way to impose a perverse political and moral calculus while depicting it as “common sense.” As Clayton aptly observes, “The most consistent hallmark of someone with an agenda, it seems, is the excessive denial of having one.”

we must consider what it takes to clear our vision and behold a bigger picture that includes incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as protagonists in their own stories and co-builders of our collective future.

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

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

Dream a little before you think.

Unicorn status is a fickle prize that can be revoked as quickly as it is bestowed. Instead of rallying around individual exceptionalism, we need to see the bigger picture and imagine new systems of education that cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity. So what is there to do?

These Old Stories continue to infect our collective imagination, distorting how we see and value different groups, cultures, and worldviews. They even warp our conception of “human nature”—selfish, not altruistic; competitive, not cooperative; hardwired, not adaptable. They presuppose a fixed genetic or cultural predisposition that ignores the plas