Octavia E. Butler’s birthday is a reminder that Black women’s visions for the future are the antidote we need

The Highland Project’s Gabrielle Wyatt observes that Octavia E. Butler envisioned our current world with eerie precision but her prophecies were not exercises in gloom. They provided a blueprint for how to fight back.

Earlier this month, a U.S. federal court of appeals panel ruled that an Atlanta-based venture capital firm should be temporarily blocked from issuing grants for Black women business owners, claiming that the program is “racially discriminatory”—according to lawyer Edward Blum who worked for years to overturn affirmative action last summer. The case has been a central legal battle over civil rights and racial justice and has threatened to limit the possibilities of a world just within our reach.