For the last year and some-odd months, there have been periods of time when waves of people on my newsfeed will change their profile photo to a picture of themselves in a hoodie. Under their photo or in their status, they will type, “I am Trayvon Martin.” Some of those people are white, some of them are not. I understand that this is done in solidarity, but I have not done these, because I am not Trayvon Martin. I don’t know what it was like to be him. I am Katie Prout. I am 25, I run far, I worry a lot, and I’m white. Trayvon Martin was a young black boy, and one way I know that I am not him is because people have said terrible things to me about young black boys and I have not told them to stop. Thinking about this makes me sick on more than just candy. Another way that I know that I am not Trayvon Martin is that today I got up to go buy some snacks, and I walked through neighborhoods where I do not look, dress, or sound like anyone else. I still got to come home.

Instead, the science fiction future I have found myself in is a sea of scientifically improbable white faces, and I have sadly and with deep regret left most English-language fantasy behind to its its fae and its beautiful red heads and its dragons shaped all wrong. I found myself drifting away despite my wishes: disillusioned by yet another Anglo-Celtic barely veiled Arthurian dragony thing with some barbarous coloured people and a whole lot of white people (GoT, I’m looking at you); surrounded by  humans on colonising, conquesting adventures through time and space. I started reading Chinese SF instead, but as a first generation adventurer into the world while that’s an option for me that’s not an option for all brown kids in an English-language world.