Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 12

Origins

THE YEAR OF 1963 was significant for the civil rights movement. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested and jailed for protesting segregation and had written his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” All over the world, people’s eyes were fixed on their television screens as Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor directed firefighters and police to use fire hoses and police dogs against African American children who were peacefully seeking to integrate Kelly Ingram Park. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech were the most high-profile events, but there was local organizing and education going on all over, including in New York City, where I was working with the Harlem Education Project (HEP). Nevertheless, several activists took time off from their organizing, boycotts, and protests in New York to join my brother, Lewie, in taking youth from HEP on a five-hundred-mile journey to Acadia National Park in Maine to see a full eclipse of the sun.

Lewie was sixteen months older than me. Growing up, we were about the same size, so people often thought we were twins. But I knew better. He could always run faster and fight harder than me. He had a way with girls I couldn’t even imagine having. He could do math problems that I didn’t know how to do. I remember once when I was in second grade, he punched me because I didn’t know how to do long division. For the most part, though, he looked after me when we were out in the world together and did what he could to soften the situation when our dad treated me harshly.

Lewie had done coursework at Drexel Institute of Technology and Haverford College, but had not completed his degree. Still, he managed by age of twenty-five to finagle his way into a job as an assistant to Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, a famous astrophysicist, a professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and a protégé of Albert Einstein. They were studying the evolution of the sun and the birth and death of stars.

Lewie came up to New York from time to time, and we enjoyed long conversations while walking. We would walk for hours—sometimes from the Lower East Side to Harlem and back. For some time, I urged Lewie to join me in New York, but he was not much interested in moving nor in the civil rights movement in general. Finally, when he learned that we had organized the tutoring program bringing students from colleges and universities throughout the region to help young people in Harlem with their studies, he agreed to come; he loved to share what he was learning about the sunspots, stars, planets, and galaxies with anyone who would listen.

As a special activity, Lewie decided to organize the field trip to Maine so kids from Harlem could view the rare and amazing phenomenon of a total solar eclipse. A total eclipse occurs when the moon passes between sun and earth, completely blocking the sun. About six times per century, a total eclipse of the sun is visible in rare locations within the United States. Lewie filled vehicles with young teenagers and adult chaperones. One was a young Stokely Carmichael,¹ who was working with HEP. On July 20, 1963, the caravan with fifty mixed-race youth from Harlem arrived at Maine’s Acadia National Park after a five-hundred-mile journey. Lewie felt this would be a powerful and unforgettable experience for them. It may have been memorable as well for the New Englanders who noticed the uncommon caravan along its way.²

As the silhouette of the moon began to edge across the face of the sun, members of the caravan had been forewarned to look away. If you look directly at the sun during an eclipse, you will damage your eyes. The young explorers hastily mounted several homemade pinhole cameras and crude homemade filtering devices (made of exposed photographic film) to watch the remarkable event. As the eclipse began, the temperature at Acadia National Park quickly dropped by twenty to thirty degrees. The wind began to howl; the flowers in the fields closed; and the birds abruptly stopped singing. Waves of alternating shadows and light passed across the land. Then, it became “night.” Stars twinkled brilliantly in the sky. A ring of fire surrounded the black disk of the moon as it passed directly over the face of the sun.

Soon, the eclipse was over. The wind ceased; the flowers opened, turning back to face the sun; and birdsong resumed.

When I was in elementary school, I skipped second grade. Because Lewie and I were so close in age, it was together that we entered the third-grade classroom of Mrs. Aikens—the teacher who would open up the world to me, inciting in me an awe and wonder many of the youth of the Harlem Education Program must have felt as they watched the moon pass over the sun with Lewie.

Every Monday afternoon, Mrs. Aikens held a science class. One of our first assignments was to collect one sample leaf from as many different trees as we could find. Each new leaf we identified was an occasion for great enthusiasm. The next step was to go out into the city and learn to identify the trees by their bark. Throughout my life, I have been able to identify many of those trees—catalpa, walnut, ash, and poplar.

Mrs. Aikens also took us to the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute’s Science Museum and taught us about the formation of the Earth’s surface. We learned how Earth’s evolution created each of the three kinds of rock—sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic—and how some contained fossils that could give us information about creatures that lived millions of years ago. She also taught us the names of the constellations and asked us to go out and look at the sky in the middle of the night to find various stars and constellations. We learned to name all the different kinds of clouds in the sky and to recognize the approach of a storm.

She told us about the dinosaurs that once roamed the hills and valleys where we lived. She took us to places where we observed the fossil record in the rocks. We learned to distinguish between tyrannosaurus and brontosaurus, as well as other types of dinosaurs. From that time on, I have been fascinated by my physical and historical surroundings.

Throughout much of my life, as I searched and reflected on past experiences, a central question remained unanswered: Where did I fit in the scheme of things? The topic came up for me over and over as I approached early professional projects and faced the fact that few African Americans practiced in my field or were considered worthy of acknowledgement. Something had gone off track in my mission to improve living conditions for people of color in their urban environments. If this was important work for my community, where was everybody? Where, I often asked myself, do we belong in the planning of the cities we share? Gradually, I came to realize that people of color do show up at planning meetings and protests when their families and community members are exposed to life-threatening impacts of pollution. But what about those of us who don’t live across the street from a toxic waste dump?

When I began reading Thomas Berry, the Catholic priest and cultural historian to whose writing Karl Linn had introduced me, I often flashed back to third grade and the feelings of gratitude, awe, wonder, and curiosity that I experienced in Mrs. Aikens’s science class.

Sometime in the 1980s, Berry began a long collaboration with astrophysicist and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme to coauthor The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. This was Berry’s vision of a new story for our times based on scientific discovery. The story recounts our origins in the context of the dramatic birth and development of the universe and invites us to see ourselves in a profoundly new way (Swimme and Berry 1992, 241–61).

I grabbed a copy as soon as it hit the shelves. While reading it, I became energized. I could tell that the universe story had something I was missing—something, in fact, that nearly all Westernized people are missing: a sense of belonging to a vast and complex web of life and experience and an invitation to participate in its continuous unfolding. Yet, for all the awe-inspiring, encouraging, and sobering elements of the story, the perspective on human history was that of the dominant, Eurocentric culture. I felt disappointed when I found not a single word about the transatlantic slave trade and the essential role of slave labor in creating our modern scientific and technological culture. This perspective ignores the embarrassing fact that the unprecedented wealth of the societies we live in was built on the foundation of bondage and forced labor of African captives—the profits made from slavery funded the industrial revolution, the development of destructive technologies, and the extraction and burning of hydrocarbons. From the outset, slavery went absolutely hand in hand with the reckless plundering of ecosystems in the New World. The exploitation of the people and environments of the New World and human beings stolen from Africa created tremendous wealth that was the foundation of the financial power that now runs the world. People of color, particularly Africans, whose forced labors undergirded a great deal of the infrastructure of the contemporary developed world, have neither been fully enfranchised into its freedoms and comforts nor received the rewards of their labor. They have traditionally been consigned to the devastated environments left behind from exploitation and extraction processes that had, meanwhile, made others wealthy.

The absence of a narrative in which people of color are recognized for their contributions to society is dangerous because it leaves unquestioned the dominance of white people on the planet today, thus tacitly endorsing the notion of white superiority. People of color receive no credit for being an essential, although coerced, part of the development of the modern world. The technological progress that Swimme and Berry (1992) both celebrate and lament rests on the skill, labor, and courage of people of color, as well as their ingenuity and grit in surviving centuries of difficult circumstances.

The dehumanization required to enslave people rests upon the same arrogance that allows the dominators to use, abuse, and pollute Earth’s living ecosystems. This dehumanization continues when the contributions of people of color are missing from the history of the modern world. Humanity cannot develop a radically new ecological conscience until we re-tell its story to include the various histories and perspectives of people of color. Attempting to solve the problem of ecosystem exploitation will never work without facing up to its companion—waste and human exploitation caused by racism.

Inside the Universe

My first inkling of being part of the universe was in the third grade when Mrs. Aikens awakened my classmates and me to the mystery of the stars in the night sky. During field trips to the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute Science Museum, I became familiar with Andromeda, Orion, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dog Star (Sirius). Later, I learned about the North Star, which served as a guide to runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. Gazing at the stars became a symbol of reaching beyond my wildest dreams.

The idea that we have a connection to the stars has been with humanity for a long time. Tales of the escapades of Greek and Roman gods have given many stars and constellations their official and common names.³ Of course, indigenous and non-Western peoples have their own names and stories about stars. African cultures have a rich oral tradition of star stories that rival the Greek myths. Auke Slotegraaf, editor of Sky Guide Africa South, compiled a sampling of these, mostly from the southern part of the continent, in his article, “African Star-Lore,” published in Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in 2013. As I searched for information about star myths, I stumbled upon an excellent resource guide called Unheard Voices, Part 1: The Astronomy of Many Cultures. The pages are easy to read, and the succinct annotations on the items listed in its carefully grouped categories are extremely helpful. Multiverse at the University of California at Berkeley, formerly the Center for Science Education, commissioned veteran astronomy and space-science educator Andrew Fraknoi of Foothill College to prepare the resource guide and now hosts the updated 2016 version online. The Multiverse tagline made me smile: Increasing Diversity in Earth and Space Science through Multicultural Education.

Discovering the developing field of archeoastronomy has been a joy. Its researchers study ancient rock etchings, paintings, and architecture of ceremonial structures that echo or record patterns and movements of stars, planets, constellations, and, not surprisingly, our sun and moon. Many of these ancient structures, built long before the origin of Western science, capture a ray of sunlight in a particular spot at sunrise or sunset on the winter or summer solstice, presumably to be witnessed and experienced in sacred ceremonies.⁴ These discoveries do not surprise me. The idea that people gazing at the sky night after night wouldn’t speculate on their connection with the stars and develop stories and ceremonies that celebrate their observations strikes me as shortsighted to say the least.

Scientific cosmology proved several decades ago that the human feeling that we come from the stars is based on fact. In 1980, astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan reported what is now common knowledge in the field of astrophysics:

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. (Sagan 1980, 233)

Contemporary astronomy provides an explanation for how those elements got from a collapsing star to us. Around 4.6 billion years ago, our sun was born from a supernova—the gigantic cosmic explosion that occurs when a star collapses. This ancient star began as a ball of light gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. As the star grew, its gravitational pressure increased, and the star’s core became a foundry for synthesizing heavier elements: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, and more. When the star became so dense, it collapsed under its own gravity, and its implosion released the energy of four billion stars, all at once. Our entire periodic table of elements was flung into space to later coalesce into new stars and solar systems, including our sun.

Swimme and Berry’s (1992) narrative in The Universe Story goes on to chronicle the formation of Earth with our sun, moon, oceans, landforms, the appearance of the first living cells and their replication, and the gradual evolution of plants and animals. They go on to recount the emergence of our human species, the creation of neolithic villages and later cities, scientific and technological discoveries, and, finally, mechanized industry. They describe the degradation of the environment in ancient and modern times, including the destructive activities undertaken in the name of technological progress.

Now, Swimme and Berry (1992) argue, humanity has reached a critical moment as a species. Our continued survival depends on forming a new, ecological consciousness. We have learned a lot about our power to affect change in and on our environment, but we have lost our ancient sense of awe and wonder at the world. We have lost our impulse to honor and respect our environment. Our great contemporary challenge is thus to regain a sense of awe, to form a sense of connection and belonging in Earth’s living ecosystem, and to learn how to live in a way that benefits the whole ecosystem.

To think about how great and sudden an impact we humans are having on planet Earth, imagine that today is midnight on New Year’s Eve and the 3.5-billion-year history of life on this planet has been compressed into the past year. The first ancestors of Homo sapiens to shape stones into rough tools, such as choppers and awls, appeared about six and a half hours ago. The first humans on Earth to cook their food using fire, wear animal skins for clothing, and manufacture hand axes appeared about eighteen minutes ago, and the first to live in villages, domesticate animals, and practice agriculture only appeared between ninety and forty-five seconds ago. People made things out of metal for the first time a little more than a minute ago, and the first pyramid was built in Egypt forty seconds ago. Jesus lived eighteen seconds ago, and Columbus and Cortés sailed across the Atlantic and set about pillaging the peoples and habitats they encountered less than five seconds ago. Most of the transatlantic slave trade has taken place between four seconds and a second and a half ago.⁵

In the past second, humans have invented the personal automobile, the airplane, the jet, the rocket, the nuclear bomb, and the computer. We’ve sent a few of us to the moon, we’ve peered into the far reaches of the universe from a giant telescope mounted in space, and we’ve sequenced the human genome. Yet, our style of living on Earth in the last five seconds is having a devastating effect on the living ecosystem of this planet. There are few signs as yet that we will change our behavior in time to avert a catastrophe of a scale encountered only once or twice in the history of life on Earth.

Thomas Berry (1999) asks us to take up what he calls the “Great Work of a people”: to help repair the damage humans have caused and build relationships of care and respect with all forms of life. Our cities are embedded in and dependent on Earth’s living systems—bioregions, ecosystems, watersheds, climate, and atmosphere. Many ecological writers herald such a shift in our relationship with the planet—from seeing it as an endless trove of resources to be exploited and manipulated to experiencing it as our companion on a journey through time. I was inspired by the idea that our cities could be redesigned from this new perspective, but the new paradigm of the city as a living system will elude our grasp if our vision is not truly inclusive. All our human communities with their diverse histories and cultures and their inherent worth need to be represented in this great shift. Without leadership representing all segments of society, we will end up reinstalling the separations and inequities that defined the preceding centuries, and new unsustainable cities will result.

The universe story could be big enough to contain this kind of inclusive reimagining of our relationship with the planet. The old story about how society evolved until we reached the pinnacle of industrial capitalism is disintegrating. The new story is that we are the end product of a process of 13.7 billion years in which the human journey is a small portion at the end. The new story includes the birth of our universe, the formation of Earth, the emergence of the first cell and human evolution, the rise of humanity in Africa, and the great migrations of all Earth’s peoples around the globe. The new story must be truthful about our origins, our history, and the forces shaping our lives today. In it, there is room for the rich, diverse experiences of all ethnic groups.