I was fascinated with the concept of time travel as a kid.
In elementary school I pieced together discarded scraps of poster board, random nuts and bolts, and a fan to create my own time machine. I combined that creation with my love of reading to imagine what it was like to live in historical eras.
My daydreams transported me to the sixties to march alongside children in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. From the safety of my grandparents’ basement, I imagined joining other young people who risked their own safety to demand the most basic rights of American citizenship. Rights such as access to a quality education and unfettered freedom.
Whenever I was bullied at school, I would rush home to hop into my time machine and zoom to a different universe where everyone got along and where peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were in abundance. Time travelers need fuel.
I devoured Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time, envious that Meg Murray discovered the secret of the tesseract and the ability to move across time and space with ease. When the film “Back to the Future” was released, I was mesmerized by the ways Marty McFly traveled back in time to right past wrongs.
Even at a young age, I was deeply enamored by a Twi (Ghanaian) concept called Sankofa that loosely translates to “go back and get it.” Sankofa is a reminder that understanding the past can help us navigate the present while preparing for the future.
My interest in going back in time was built on the idea that revisiting the past could help us build a better future. Through pop culture artifacts like the children’s series “The Magic School Bus” and “Land of the Lost,” we could escape to the past to figure out what was wrong and what needed to be done. Over the last week, however, a slew of Supreme Court decisions has firmly returned our country to past eras of discrimination that even Doc Brown can’t save us from.
