Black people have a complicated relationship with movement. Our history is a timeline of displacement and transport: Slave ships. Underground railroads. Eviction from gentrified neighborhoods. As our history is marked by a lack of control over transportation and our environments, we’ve spent centuries finding alternate ways to move through space, transforming our culture and society through the sensual twist of our hips and the formation of marches and protests. Our bodies are us moving in a more inclusive direction. We are continually in transit toward an ideal.

To move within and between places does not always involve physical locomotion. In sci-fi, transportation is imagined as a means of contemplating blackness, meditating on racism, sexism, and homophobia, and exploring historical and futuristic worlds. Its black creators and artists are establishing themselves in a world where black bodies are continually erased, appropriated, and oppressed. Transporting oneself to ancestral, technological, intergalactic, and psychological spaces allows us to cultivate our own forms—and divorce ourselves from systemic ones.

Take Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, laden with Afrofuturism: the use of African and black elements and advanced technology, magical realism, and fantasy as a way of exploring our (you guessed it) future. T’Challa’s comfort with his ancestry—his Africanness—is illustrated by the ease with which he travels to the ancestral plane, a spiritual dimension where panthers chill alongside deceased Wakandans. The process involves drinking a deep purple elixir made from the Heart-Shaped herb, a healing flower that also allows the Black Panther to pass into the spiritual world. After drinking (usually following strenuous battles), the Black Panther is buried under a mound of sand or snow, as their body shuts off and rejuvenates while their mind wanders to the spiritual plane. (A medicinal beverage that also inspires you to lean in to a different mind state? Come on—the Heart-Shaped herb elixir is purple drank.)

T’Challa's and Killmonger’s experiences in the ancestral plane are two sides of a coin of blackness. For T’Challa, it is a homecoming, a welcoming embrace into a spiritual realm in African culture. On T’Challa’s trips to the ancestral place, he seeks guidance, reassurance, and ultimately closure from his father. This transit allows for reconciliation of his past and realization of his potential future. However, Killmonger’s ancestral plane is a devastating purgatory, where he’s driven further into the heartache he endured as a black person in America. He finds his father stuck in limbo, still residing in the apartment he was murdered in decades ago.

In the father and son’s conversations, blackness and spirituality is a perpetual state of being lost and unfound; abandoned, even, from Wakanda. No matter how widely Killmonger travels, how many rituals passed or languages learned, he isn’t fully accepted as Wakandan because he wasn’t born there.

Transition is also a storytelling device in black sci-fi-horror. There’s Jordan Peele’s Sunken Place in Get Out, a (literally) petrifying psychological state where the subject is unwillingly buried into their subconscious, left immobile while a white person overtakes their body and suppresses their reactions and choices. A family of faux-liberal white people lures black men and women into their home (via the daughter, who poses as a supportive, woke girlfriend) and, after a series of mind-control games with teacups and silver spoons, transplants old white men’s brains into young black men. By stealing black bodies, white people are able to fulfill their greatest stereotypical fantasies, like being well-endowed or physically strong.

The protagonist’s eventual escape is especially moving because he has to reclaim his space—his right to exist—by fighting his way back into his own body, resisting hypnotism, and killing his girlfriend and her family. The irony is that his mode of transportation—the material he puts in his ears to avoid being taken to the Sunken Place—is the same material that held us in bondage in the first place: cotton.