⤴✊ The techno-optimism of a 1970s Black Power activist and poet

The late Nikki Giovanni displayed an Up Wing attitude sorely lacking among today's social justice warriors

The New York Times obituary for Nikki Giovanni, who died Monday at age 81, calls her a “charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love.” And based on the rest of that obit and her Wikipedia entry, it sounds like a pretty accurate description.

From Wikipedia: “Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the ‘Poet of the Black Revolution.’”

I concede a lack of familiarity with Giovanni’s work, only becoming aware of her in 2020 while researching my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. The poet was featured as part of an expert Q&A section in The Tricentennial Report: Letters from America, a 1977 booklet sponsored by Atlantic Richfield, a Los Angeles-based oil and gas producer. (I snagged a copy on eBay.)

A year earlier, the American Bicentennial had prompted the company to run advertisements in newspapers and magazines across America inviting readers to write letters to their future fellow Americans in the far-off Tricentennial year of 2076. Those ads generated some 6,000 responses with a selection included in the 80-page report, along with the expert Q&A. The citizen letters contain plenty of speculative dystopian fiction about America and the world in 2076, often focusing on themes of overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource shortages, and American collapse.