"The question of more pointed significance to the Black community is whether the advent of and devotion to science—which has been used, as a science fiction, throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to justify slavery and the inferiority of Blacks—will undercut religion in the African diaspora. Religion has long occupied the central role in the freedom struggle of the Black community (Du Bois, Souls 211-20; Franklin 92-95,146-47; Woodson 52-53). According to Hartwell, much of futurist fiction in the 1940s and 1950s elevated scientific knowledge above other systems of thought, and thus “a lot of it was xenophobic, elitist, racist, and psychologically naive” (38). Apparently, not even the recent unmasking of the widespread eradication or co-opting of diasporic scientific accomplishments engendered by the wave of Black studies programs initiated in the early 1970s has undone the Black community’s suspicion toward science."