Close your eyes, breathe, and imagine the world 10, 20, or even 30 years from now. What do you see? Admittedly, when we did this, it was hard not to imagine a dystopian planet ruined by our lack of care for our ecosystems and for each other. It’s easy to get trapped into this vision of the future after reading one too many novels or seeing one too many movies showing a community of multiracial folk scrambling to find their place in a world of scarcity and competition.

We had to give ourselves some grace to move past the obvious limitations of that vision, and we invite you to do so as well. Instead, let’s take un pasito pa’lante (a little step forward) and dream of a remarkable, multi-racial world where all people’s needs are met, and think of this not as a utopian vision, but as an acceptable and very real possibility.

Consider the world portrayed in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where director Ryan Coogler presents us with a vision of what is possible when we decenter our narratives from white-, male-, hetero-centric viewpoints and stop looking at each other as villains in our own stories but rather as accomplices committed to preserving and protecting each other and the power we hold as individual communities and collectively.

Stories like Wakanda Forever demonstrate the level of violence that colonization, conquest, and genocide have caused throughout generations—and how we can overcome them. It challenges us to see Talokan, the underwater kingdom rooted in Indigenous Mayan and Aztec cultures, as a possibility despite the barriers the fictional community faced to survive.

When we think about the future of technology and social innovation, we need to do so through an alternative lens, just like in Wakanda Forever, and believe in a future where everyone has the talent, vision, and access to build projects that are sustainable and beneficial to all. We need to visualize a world rooted in abundance that rejects the idea that Blackness and Indigeneity must continue to be considered nonexistent in the Americas.

Read the full article about radical reimagination by Ana Marie Argilagos and Hilda Vega at Stanford Social Innovation Review.