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.
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
