Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses uses critical dystopia to challenge us to build a better future

We would like to thank Blanka Grzegorczyk for the contribution to this article.

Between 2013 and 2015, Malorie Blackman was Britain’s first black children’s laureate. Her young adult series Noughts and Crosses (2001-21) at once challenges and plays with the prevailing racial ordering of western life and thought.

Blackman’s series is set in an alternative Britain called Albion, where power is held by a dominant, black majority known as the “Crosses”, while the white “Noughts” are stigmatised minority subjects. In doing so, Blackman suggests that if we see difference as threatening or inferior, then any alternative worlds we imagine will just reflect our own culture. The upending of racial formations, the books seem to suggest, could result in an equally powerful, reverse form of oppressi