After Medusa was decapitated, it is said that her blood spilled onto seaweed, mixed with the sea, and transformed into a hybrid organism: bright red, Precious coral. The coral slowly gathered, building, the minerals adhering, becoming larger and larger until it had spread for miles across the ocean floor. Fish swam in and out and between, bubbles in the wake creating ripples of life on the surface. The sun streamed down, refracting through the depths, shockingly illuminating the vibrant color. These were not the intended effects of Medusa’s death, this stony life emerging from spilled blood, an entire underwater world that is one of the most important ecosystems on earth. She lives on through this transmogrification.  

Corals call to people, pulling us down into the space of the ancestors. These watery worlds no longer provide the conditions to thrive; we gave up our gills when ancient relations crawled out of the sea. And now, legs and an upright posture have afforded a certain view, one that some of us, as Sylvia Wynter demonstrates, have taken way too seriously. A Caribbean scholar, Wynter carefully maps how propertied white European men came to be understood as the universal signifier of Man, and everyone was measured in their capacity, or inability, to become like them. She calls this process the “overrepresentation of Man,” meaning that it enforced only one legitimate way of being human. People and other beings were then sorted in a strict hierarchy, where some were valued and others were not, a hierarchy of humanity that remains in place today. We have been left with “our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of earth resources…[which] are all different facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”