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Despite waiting months for the movie They Cloned Tyrone to come out, I still forgot about the official drop date. But even though I am late, the film was very much on time, and it brought up several themes that have appeared in some of the articles and books I am reading, as well as other television series and films from the past few years.
Primarily, the film brought me back to an article by Professor Ruha Benjamin titled “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” in which Benjamin makes the statement that “Social scientists, for our part, are often in the business of documenting dystopias, which offer a starting point for imagining alternatives” (Benjamin 19).
She references the sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois, whose science fiction story ‘The Comet’ is considered the first example of African-American speculative fiction. For Benjamin and many others, DuBois is also the first example of using social science research to inform speculative imagining by bridging the gap between science and storytelling, or what Benjamin describes as biological facts and racial fiction.
This is why the Benjamin article begins as a traditional academic article, and then from pages 4 through 18, it turns into the speculative fiction story “Ferguson is the Future.” Like many speculative stories, Benjamin drops us into a new world, set in the year 2064, in which an organization known as the “People’s Science Council” attempts to regenerate Eric Garner on the 50th anniversary of his death.
In this world, they passed legislation called the Reparations Act of 2025, which allows victims of police brutality to have their organs replaced and life restored after injury or death. In this society, families can also…
