The Race Of Science Is The Science Of Race.

(ThyBlackMan.com) Today rockets pierce the heavens. Men walk the moon. And we communicate, mind-to-mind, instantaneously, projecting our voices through the ether, our images onto the screen and our thoughts over the net. We “make” babies in test tubes, and toy with the idea of re-creating, that is, cloning ourselves. Scientists are hard at work attacking every secret of the universe, including its genesis. However, as we rise, so too we fall. We pollute the planet with nuclear refuse, the burning of fossil fuels, and with every throw away fork and plate we use. The catalyst for this insane race of Science is the Science of race.

Racism based on skin color developed in late 17th century England, alongside the increasing importance of the American colonies, with their twin policies of extermination of the Native Americans and enslavement of Black Africans. This racism pervaded the thought of Locke, Hume and other English thinkers. Their influence –and that of the new European explorers of other continents—was important at the University of Gottingen, founded in 1734 by George II, Elector of Hanover and King of England, and forming a cultural bridge between Britain and Germany. The first ‘academic’ work on human racial classification –which naturally put Whites, or to use his new term, ‘Caucasians’, at the head of the hierarchy –was written in the 1770s by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Gottigen. The university pioneered the establishment of modern disciplinary scholarship (Black Athena, 27,28)

So, we see that at the very inception of modern science, a distinct “white race” was said to be superior to all other “races.” Yes, the concept of race has long since been debunked, but it still holds sway over the scientific community. Western thinkers cannot look beyond and before Greece in 600 BCE if, that is, they want to maintain their bona fides. That is when and where the idea of a purely rational world view was conceived. Thus, we find ourselves carried along by a relentless tide of scientific discovery and its unthinking application to the creation of every device, process and procedure imaginable, notwithstanding the cost to our environment and ourselves. We do not know where Science is taking us because we will not countenance where it came from.

In Africa libations are poured to honor the ancestors. In the Academy, scientists employ footnotes to document their work. Are they not the same? With footnotes we credit those on whose shoulders we stand, our ancestors on the journey of scientific inquiry. Citations give them their due and enable those who come after us to use our sources in the ongoing inquiry. Likewise, with libations we honor those who came before and made our lives possible, the ancestors. Scientists badly damage their endeavors when they fail to credit those who came before, their scientific ancestors. This is not just a failing to give credit where credit is due. It distorts the scientific enterprise. The systematic exclusion of Africans’ and others’ accomplishments profoundly warps the nature and application of scientific inquiry.

We know full well that race is not a valid concept, but still we subscribe to it. We learned long ago that pure rationalism cannot explain the world and all that it contains, but still we still cling to it. And things are, in fact, real insofar as we believe them to be so. Thus, two bankrupt concepts, race and pure rationalism, though long discredited, lock each other in place. However, the more we can come to see the holism of humanity, the more we will see the whole that is all humanity’s search for knowledge. Black Studies and all the other Multcultural Studies are tools to unravel this Gordian knot. African Americans’ struggle for equality is not just about equal rights for individuals. It also seems equal standing for the contributions of the cultures that produced Africans. Ditto the struggle for equality of Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, Women, Gays etc. Whereas European civilization created the exclusively rational science which is despoiling the planet, other civilizations functioned in harmony with Mother Nature.

To the extent that Black Studies focuses exclusively on the Black struggle, ignoring other movements, to that extent Black Studies falls prey to the same piecemeal rationality of the Science of the West. Yes, Black Studies’ interests diverge from the other Multicultural Studies, but they converge as well. Though difficult, a balance must be sought. And balance is what all humanity wants, balance between the convenience and comfort that Science has provided and the toll it takes on us. Kiyonnosatsqui, a life out of balance, is what the Native Americans call how we live today.

ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE

Just as each of us is an individual organism, we are each an organism within the super organism that is the US body politic. And the US is but a single organism in the super organism that is humanity. These are all just different orders of magnitude, and the highest order of magnitude is the all-encompassing super organism, the entirety of life on Earth. Global warming is the Earth’s attempt to balance out our depredations. We are essentially a fungus on the fruit that is the Earth. Note a parasite is neither good nor bad even should it destroy its host. It simply is. We simply are. The prime directive of all living things is to go forth and multiply, and multiply we certainly have.

Though a fungus, we are a thinking fungus. And so we see clearly the handwriting on the wall, Global Warming, Earth running a fever to rid itself of the infection that is us. We are but a phase of life on the planet. How long shall we last? That is largely up to us. The outlook may seem dire, but remember what Martin Luther King said at the climax of the Civil Rights Movement echoing James Russell Lowell at the height of the Abolition Movement. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, stands God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.” (Arthur Lewin, 2019)

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