ABSTRACT
Futurology is the study of future probabilities. Scientists involved in futurology analyze patterns and trends to come up with a set of different scenarios, each of which has a different probability of occurring. Out of these studies, the hope is that policymakers might be able to make decisions that encourage positive future scenarios and discourage negative ones. This chapter is not futurology, but it shares many of its ambitions. The chapter is a fictional story set approximately a decade into the future; it is not a prediction of how a new apartheid is going to shape global governance by mid-century. Rather, it is a story that rests upon the structures, tendencies, and trends of racial ordering that exist now across a set of different scales—city, state, and globe. The story gives these tendencies and trends ten years’ worth of play, that is, it accelerates their movements. Readers should not interpret it as a prediction but a story about the here and now, about how some futures might be birthed in today’s apartheid structures. These racist structures are to be found in geographies of segregation, new information technology, neoliberal economics, public health, and global development, and the way these structures articulate—that is, fold into one another. Yet, this story is also not dystopian. There are worrisome and alarming details, but there also exists the capacity and will of human beings to find creative ways to ameliorate, resist, and perhaps overcome inequality and repression.
