Afrofuturist Prediction

The goal of Afrofuturist prediction is to get everyone safely and in their whole mind into the future.

Prediction requires us to imagine a present that can allow us to survive into the future. It insists that we can navigate the obstacles before us with pluck, strategy, and awareness.

There’s little use in predicting Black futures that cannot be entered with grace and peace, since even death can be entered with grace and peace.

That human across the table, maybe a friend, a family member, or a client, who is vulnerable and asking you to speak clarity over their life, deserves more than judgment. They deserve more than our opinions dressed up in vaguely spiritual language. They deserve more than Barnum and bluster.

They are asking for the truth—we must call on their ancestors, spirit guides, angels and blessed dead and tell them the truth through the practice of prediction.

Not with a side of glass sent to cut them down to size. Certainly not with oppressive spiritualism that tightens the noose around their necks.

But with clarity, with joy as a roadmap to a better place in their lives.

Black people have predicted the future ever since there’s been a future to predict. Our methods over time are uncountable. It’s predictable that someone who is able to predict will be born into most families. Most Black families take that for granted, it’s not exactly common, but few regard it as an impossibility.

As such, prediction is something to which many of us assume we will always have access. This could come in the form of a dream, a vision, a page of the Bible, a turn of the card, a throwing of bones.

It could come from yourself through a personal form of divination, but just as often it comes through other people.

Allowing someone else to speak over your future is risky. It requires openness and, before you ever come through the reader’s door, an admission that you need help.

This is part of why I have such a problem with readings that exploit or simply fail to respect a client’s open posture.

When a client comes to my table, my concerns are on my own accuracy and helpfulness, of course—but they’re also about my ability to be empathetic and compassionate regardless of what comes up.

That doesn’t mean I tolerate bullshit, but the honest truth is that I’ve never had anyone bring real bullshit to my table.

There are many reasons for that I’m sure, some of which I probably can’t fully fathom. Yet I do believe that it’s partly because I really do feel for my clients. Even when they’re in the wrong.

I feel for them whether they got cheated on or did the cheating. I feel for them when their work gets reversed on them them and fucks their shit up. I feel for them in their jealousy; I feel for them in their rage.

That doesn’t mean I don’t tell them the truth as I see it—that’s not compassionate either in my opinion!

It means I do so with care for the person, living in the positive and negative qualities of their own humanity.

“Where we stand determines what we’re able to see,” Octavia Butler writes in “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.”

If I’m coming into a reading expecting to tear someone up about their choices, and force my words on their future, I’m more likely to do that. When I view the point of a reading differently, I can take a more humble stance.

Learn More

When we tell someone’s fortune, we assume that the future is coming. It’s not that the future cannot be changed, but those tweaks and possibilities sit with divination rather than fortune telling.

Fortune telling, in my estimation, tells us the consequences of the actions we’ve already taken. The future it sees may be short or long—but to tell a fortune assumes that the person at the other side of your table has a future to be foreseen.

The assumption that the future can be known and navigated, whether with expertise and grace, or even clumsily, is kind. When we look upon the consequences of someone else’s actions, it can be easy to chastise, criticize, and even want to slap them in the back of the head.

Resisting those urges reminds us of how we too have transgressed, have hurt others, have been wrong. Working with clients can give a reader an opportunity to meet others with the grace we wish we were shown.

Every prediction of someone else’s future is a reminder that we shape our own.

It invites us toward a different posture when we fail to reach the heights we saw for ourselves, because if we could minister to our clients in their moment of lost work, lost love, lost integrity, then do we not deserve the same?

It invites us to consider how the worst could happen to any of us, and it reminds us that what folks going through a hard time need doesn’t begin and end with judgement.

This is especially important for those of us who, like myself, mostly or exclusively read for Black people.

We’re the last ones who need harsh criticism. Society is literally set up to punish and police us—why should our readers do the same?

Now before I start sounding too warm and fuzzy, the role of the rootworker and conjure doctor has LONG (possibly always) involved some admonishment.

As Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes in Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System (p. 252), rootworkers, readers, etc were also called on to address “personal, behavioral, and discipline problems within families, such as disobedient youth.”

I think, however, that such criticism should be very careful not to enforce the same systems of disposability, bigotry, and simple meanness that many of us found in, say, The Church. (Though this passage was about rootworkers in The Church, just fyi.)

How can we tell fortunes with the knowledge that Black people exist in the future? What would we focus upon? How would we speak to the friend about to go back to her terrible ex for the fourth time who asked you to read her cards, or the stranger whose actions are having increasingly dire consequences when they come in for their New Year’s card turning?

What strategies would we employ? How would we diversify our intuitive, predictive, and prophetic instincts?

When prediction sounds exactly like judgement, it’s easy to discard it even when we know it’s right.

As we understand that the gifts and traditions we call Hoodoo can lead us to a liberated Black future, may we strive to develop a posture of working in those gifts that creates a kinder way for our people: a pro-Black style of reading that helps us imagine humane Black futures.

Afrofuturist prediction is about more than getting to freedom, though of course that’s of utmost importance. Afrofuturist prediction is about adopting the revolutionary posture as a fortune teller or reader that you hope will continue into the beautiful Black future.

I don’t believe that we give cutting readings, hurting readings, selfish readings today and the world changes for the better we suddenly stop. I think we have to build the world in which we share our gifts with kindness and compassion now.

“So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible?” Butler asks at the end of “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” Her answer: “[b]ecause making predictions is one way to give warning when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses.”

When we focus on finding the safer, wiser path with our friends, families, community members, our clients, and ourselves we create a future of greater gentleness, easeful survival, and mutual abundance.

Work with Me