Trigger warning: This content discusses the trauma of colonization. It includes descriptions of slavery and oppression, which may be distressing, especially for enslaved African descendants. Viewer discretion is advised.

Chapter 2 “The Axe forgets; the tree remembers” – African proverb.

As the title of this new chapter explains, we cannot remove time, meaning the reality we created, unlike Western science’s binary logic, which seems to believe when it invalidates its former theory and moves alone to validate the next one. When we try to bury it as Eurocentric Western culture does, time lingers in our collective subconscious until it pops in the form of unaddressed biased perceptions we believe are a reality, including in science.

The European colonization of humanity’s reality was a centuries-old ill-designed medicine to save humankind from itself. Following its perceived continuous improvement philosophy, Western science was supposed to cure humans of imperfection through its discriminative binary logic of eugenics, meaning White supremacy and purity, the progress of the race theory. Then, it debunked its harmful concepts and moved alone to create the next ones. It validates one theory, one dimension after another, following an imaginary straight line called progress, whose mean became an end.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” emphasizes the saying attributed to Jewish, German, Swiss, Hungarian, and American WWII refugee physicist and accidental philosopher Albert Einstein. As Semmelweis’s story also taught us, creativity comes from those who dare to think outside the binary logic’s box.

Thus, after the first chapter of our insightful story has set up the big picture of our overlooked, enlightening account, we will dare the boldest movement science has ever seen. We will explore the patient experiences of European colonization through a non-standard historical device: the African diaspora’s holistic oral tradition.

African oral tradition’s multidimensional logic plays a significant role in collective healing, which individualistic Western logic still struggles to comprehend. Its purposeful cyclic journey’s goal is infinite learning, deeper and deeper, including more and more dimensions. Its never-ending progress starts from the big picture, as I did in the first chapter, and flows to the individual cases, as the following account does.

Our enlightening story starts in the late 18th-century Kingdom of Kongo. A free, playful child was kidnapped, enslaved, and sold across the Atlantic Eight generations ago because Western science believed she was like an animal. My shell-shocked ancestors vowed never to forget her. During the Great Migration, as our oral tradition calls it, our entire clan moved north and inland with other distressed Kongo people to escape the growing slave raids, carrying heavy hearts. We have been running ever since; no generation was born in the same place as their parents. We knew nothing more about what happened to the missing child until the decolonization gave us answers we weren’t ready to hear.

In the 1960s, my father left the newly decolonized Congo as an 18-year-old student and moved to France to study architecture. There, he met other runaways: African American refugees fleeing White supremacy and brutal racial discrimination. Famous figures like trumpeter Miles Davis, pianist and singer Nina Simone, writer James Baldwin, and many less visible students and workers exemplified this overlooked self-preservation movement. 

Along with their captivating stories of incredible success, these U.S. migrants shared brutal accounts of our missing families and shared ancestors. The latter ones survived the enduring walk to the civilized European enslavers’ African forts and technologically advanced boats. There, we survived starvation, diseases, savage beating, and rapes. We survived the dreaded Middle Passage that killed millions of us in the same conditions. Then, on the other Atlantic shore, our African identity was wiped out with whips, beatings, and verbal abuse to the point that “acting like an African” became an insult within the traumatized future Black communities.

Then, our families were further divided. Children, mothers, and fathers were separated and sold any time their owners needed to, often for profitable reasons. Enslaved Africans were treated like cattle in scorching fields and forced to reproduce in lucrative human breeding farms. Those brave humans also became cleaning house pets in immaculate mansions often owned by violent men drawn to bestiality and blithe elegant women. Slave patrols and vigilantes pursued the defiant ones who held onto their humanity by running away.

Once freed, enslaved African descendants became undesirable American citizens and pests to eradicate thanks to superior Western science’s eugenics: they held onto their humanity by the mere act of existing.

The Industrial Revolution (1640-1860) and related technological progress made once thought-after skills less relevant. Many became unpaid sharecroppers, often in an unprofitable business relationship with their former wealthy owners. Others fought racial segregation to get an upskilling education. Many faced high unemployment, generational poverty and violence, overcriminalization, forced sterilization, house discrimination, and lynching.

Like Native Americans, African Americans struggled with the erasure of their culture and history in the Eurocentric mainstream through the forgetful education system and the silent media. Indeed, many influential European colonizer descendants continued to manifest their perceived God-given destiny on other humans. Seen from the soulful African culture, which often values humanity’s interconnectedness, humility, and wisdom, some European Americans had a few baffling oral traditions.

In those mind-spinning narratives, which were still common in the sixties in the American South’s lost cause, nothing existed in America before the brave European colonizers arrived. They built the country alone from scratch with their strong hands and superior intelligence, fighting against harsh natural elements, including the Native Americans who denied the European colonizers’ supreme destiny on this God-given, inhabited, abundant land.

European colonizers gave the enslaved Africans generational work opportunities that taught them skills like cultivating cotton, rice, indigo, and other plants indigenous to Africa and absent in Europe. The enslavers cared for their human goods and paid for food and clothes, and it wasn’t cheap to maintain a human herd then. Still, the generous colonizers fulfilled this considerable responsibility.

Meanwhile, the enslaved Africans felt fulfilled with their secured life employment. It was a fantastic stability that even the immigrant European indentured servants didn’t have. Indeed, the latter were left to their own devices after their hard work repaid the transatlantic boat fare. So, Africans were lucky to be able to ride for free. The South fought to defend this blissful, prosperous way of life based on honorable work during the Civil War: it was never about keeping slavery.

Besides, the European enslavers couldn’t be held accountable for abusing enslaved Africans in America if it happened. It was the sole fault of brutal African tribal chiefs from whom the innocent Europeans bought the poor Africans. Hence, Africa should pay for reparations.

African Americans should even thank European Americans for saving them from Africa, an undeveloped continent stuck in time, as the reputable National Geographic and other objective media showed. It was better that they had forgotten their uncivilized, violent roots.

Indeed, Africans were brutal savages killing each other, unlike the civilized, peaceful Europeans who built the most harmonious unified civilization humanity had ever seen. All the dramatic deaths and unfortunate mass rapes during European colonization were unavoidable collateral damage to humanity’s progress and relatively marginal compared to the great benefits. When humankind’s saviors implemented a superior civilization, the world gained from being transformed into Europe 2.0. It was the best and only acceptable development path for humanity.

Meanwhile, African American thugs unjustifiably drove the crime statistics in America, as the Black-on-Black crime data illustrated: they were naturally violent. It was a fact. Science never lied, nor was it racist: it was objective. The civil rights advocates and anti-racists complaining about it couldn’t deal with the reality.

Nobody evolved stuck in the past, anyway. So, African Americans should stop complaining and seeing racism everywhere. There was none since European Americans didn’t see it. Indeed, any evolved rational human knew reality existed only when one saw it, especially if it was the majority; it was called common sense.

Black Americans were the ones being racists when those divisive race baiters brought the topic of race all the time while everybody was equal now. Many Black people succeeded, proving there was no need for affirmative action. Besides, the European American middle class wasn’t privileged, and there were poor people of European descent. It was that proof racial discrimination didn’t exist, and the civil rights advocates were racist against White people. Criticizing an imperfect but great system designed by European descendants was blaming all White people for its faults in the past, the present, and the future. It was insensitive, generalizing, and unfair.

Indeed, everybody could be racist. It wasn’t only about White supremacy, according to the unilateral decision of the trustworthy Merriam-Webster dictionary. It was human nature. The most popular dictionary represented Western culture’s common sense, after all. Who were those radical decolonization activists to challenge a long-established impartial and objective authority?

Besides, European Americans fought to free African Americans from slavery and even gave them Civil Rights. They bent backward, right and left, to repair the few unfortunate injustices collateral of creating America. It was proof of boundless generosity, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Those ungrateful African Americans could see that those positive actions overrode the negative ones if they were as good in math as Asian Americans.

So, the enslaved descendants should get out of their victim mentality and stop focusing on the negative because everybody suffered, and they had it now better than anyone else. Efforts for more diversity and inclusion were about eradicating and discriminating against White people. Why shall we keep historical Black colleges, universities, and other Black-dedicated organizations when Black people could join the majority now? Could you imagine if European descendants had white-only spaces? It would be labeled as racial segregation. However, it’s normal for Black people to do it when they don’t want to be with White people as if there were something wrong with European descendants. It was a racist double standard and went against equality. Black people loved being marginalized to play the victims and have special treatment, erasing the White culture. The international community could let this genocide and apartheid happen against White people.

Indeed, European Americans allocated more resources to educate, employ, and economically advance African Americans through Affirmative Action than any other groups. The best person should have the job based on their skills. Reality no longer favored European descendants since racial desegregation, so everybody became equal on July 2, 1964. America turned became color-blind and achieved the highest standard of objectivity. Selecting people following their race was to choose mediocre workers.

Affirmative action brought back inequalities. European Americans were now suffering the most because they weren’t privileged anymore, while African Americans were. If Black Americans weren’t so self-absorbed and stopped making reality only about themselves, they couldn’t see that White Americans were the most discriminated against.

Thus, those lazy, welfare-addicted African Americans should be more self-aware and start to self-reflect. Then, maybe they could work hard like Latino Americans and other eager new immigrants who, unlike them, didn’t dwell in the past nor continuously complained after they arrived in America. Black Americans should forget history, ignore nonexistent racial discrimination, focus on the positive, and move on to succeed. It was how White European Americans became the most successful on Earth because America, the Land of the Brave and the Free, was a meritocracy.

So, Black Americans complaining about history was only to make White Americans feel guilty and get more privileges while working less. And it worked: some European Americans fell for this. They betrayed the embattled race that the Lost Cause narrative talked on the entire behalf and was the sole representative and authority. They lived in an alternative reality and talked nonsense on their own. They hated themselves so much and were so delusional that they believed they were responsible for the past and its perceived wrongs. Meanwhile, their ancestors suffered to this great land with their blood and tears. So, there was no such thing as generational wealth.

America was never racist. A handful of well-intentioned men did what everybody did to lead their country at that time; it was the norm then. Those people were dead a long ago. There was no more slavery. There was no more racial segregation. Thus, everybody was equal now. America was united, peaceful, and free. Those radical Civil Rights advocates and decolonization scholars disturbed a long-fought harmony, prosperity, balance, and fairness.

America had a God-given exceptional heritage worth fighting for. Hence, if those oblivious, ungrateful, protesting Black African Americans—or whatever they called themselves—weren’t happy and didn’t embrace it, they could leave the greatest place on Earth. They could see if it were better outside, as did the White supremacy refugees my shell-shocked Black African father encountered in Europe, the original fabric of Whiteness. Americans were indeed the best at everything.

Most African Americans stayed because, after the brutal erasure of their meaningful roots, they had nowhere to go. Many hyphenated themselves as Africans, only not to forget where their resilient ancestors came from. Others called themselves Black people as a reminder they were at the beginning of the construction of the USA with the White people. They reappropriated the term Western science gave us and transformed it into excellence. None were wrong or right. All had different experiences and strategies to survive and strive in a Eurocentric environment fostering White supremacy and purity, the two twisted pillars of eugenics, the overlooked deadly innovation of Western science’s magical thinking. My Dad stressed we needed to respect their enduring journey and call each individual as they wanted to identify.

My father’s shaking words still echoed in my pounding heart today. He said, “The first Black American I met was an architecture student from Detroit. It was my first time meeting someone who could have been our missing family since we escaped slavery. I approached him as if he were another African student and nodded to acknowledge his humanity. But he ignored me. He was cold and distant, like a European. He looked down at me as if I were a savage cannibal living in a tree. Then, other African students told me that being African was an insult to many African Americans. We were fresh off the boat to them. So, this American student didn’t want to mingle and identify with us. He wanted to stay civilized.”

My Dad explained that many African Americans believed the dehumanizing Eurocentric narrative about Africa, which the European cannibalization of humanity’s reality left. Most didn’t know their ancestors were already farmers with advanced technologies adapted to warm and humid climates and a deep expertise in plants Indigenous to Africa and America, like cotton, rice, and indigo. We were blacksmiths, as the beautiful Benin Bronzes captive in the British Museum showed. We were fishermen, soldiers, merchants, and other occupations Europeans had and exploited in America. They were also physicians and pharmacists, as my sister and I are today, as my grandmother, great-grandmother, and many women before us were.

My father said, “Colonization took our most valued resources. The European elites needed the most resilient, hard-working, and skilled of us to build their countries overseas in Brazil, the Caribbeans, the USA, and other countries.”

The first Africans in the Americas were from West-Central Africa, our Ancestral region. In Portuguese Brazil, Kongo prince Nganga Nzumba (1639-1678) led the first settlement of runaway slaves (Quilombo dos Palmares). Meanwhile, his nephew Zumbi (1655-1695) became one of the most resistance leaders still revered in Brazil today and celebrated every year on November 20. The Kongo people also led the largest slave rebellion in the Thirteen British Colonies in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739, under the leadership of Jemmy Cato. They busted the myth of the happy slaves still carried in today’s lost cause narrative. So, the European colonizers feared the untamable Bakongo. The demand for Kongo slaves in the USA decreased. Our rebelling families saved our lives in the African Kingdom.

Kongo spirituality was used for resistance, as were the many wooden statutes, iron pots, and other religious artifacts found across the Americas, including in Wye Plantation, the birthplace of abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass. Until emancipation, enslaved Africans used the Dikenga encircle cross, a symbol of the Kongo Cosmogram and spirituality, as secret signs in the Underground Railroad to guide the enslaved to freedom in the USA.

During post-colonization, some Kongo people started to repair the oral tradition that transatlantic slavery broke, as my father started in the 1960s. Then, the Stono Rebellion and South Carolina gained spiritual significance for many Kongo people after we learned about the sacrifice our enslaved families made in the USA that spared us from human trafficking. Today, I’m because they are.

My dad continued, “In Kongo, the Europeans enslaved us because of our expertise in cultivating rice. When we realized it, the Kingdom gathered all its experts to find a solution to protect us from slavery.”

So, architects continued to move villages further away from the main roads to avoid slave raids. Meanwhile, scientists were mainly women in the Kongo matriarchal culture, while women in Europe fought for emancipation. They brainstormed and selected the most bitter and complex species of cassava to cultivate, which colonizers had no interest in. Then, the African kingdom changed its skills and diet from one day to another to become useless to the colonizers.

The colonizers interpreted this common African survival strategy as Africans being lazy. European scientist explorers noted it as they updated their racial theory with new groundbreaking findings confirming Swedish Linnaeus’ classification of humanity. Later, Eurocentric Western science’s binary logic invalidated the biased theory based more on magical thinking than evidence-based rationality. As it believed it was enough to cancel the twisted truth it created, it moved on to validate and invalidate other realities, as it still does today. Hence, Western science’s unofficial motto, “Shoot innovation first. Ask questions later. Let the humanities deal with the causalities.”

Meanwhile, African science says, “The axe forgets; the tree remembers.” Racial theory sedimented deep into Western culture’s collective subconscious, as the lost cause narrative illustrates. Centuries later, racist biases still perceive American enslaved African descendants as lazy and violent.

Then, Asians have an imitative intelligence, are feeble, and are a threat to the European descendants’ jobs, as per the Yellow Peril narrative. Southern and Eastern Europeans are a lesser version of Western Europeans thanks to eugenics, race theory’s discriminative progress that classified them as semi-colored. Science’s harm echoed after Western Europe assimilated Eastern Europe. The lesser Europeans became a threat to Western Europeans to Western Europe jobs following the post-Cold War narrative. Science’s long toxicity resonated when Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain were referred to as the PIGS countries endangering the European Union’s prosperity in the 2008 Financial crisis narrative. Meanwhile, Jewish people are greedy and conspiring following the eugenics narrative in Germany, Western science’s flowering lighthouse before WWII.

All of today’s Western stereotypes about humanity can be retrieved from science archives, documenting centuries of magical thinking presented as evidence-based reality. There are so many distorted scientific narratives that it will take several books that Western science didn’t write to deconstruct each. When Western science’s binary logic invalidated, buried them, and moved to the next reality to validate, often alone, it deprived humanity of clarity today.

European colonization could bend reality effectively because science captured and fixed the European zeitgeist in time. Today, many Westerners still believe in the colonizing laws and order and maintain the Eurocentric gravity. The higher their social status, the more cohesive the delusional structure called Civilization with a capital C, and the more humanity’s reality disintegrates. In a multidimensional logic, healing this disintegration through authentic efforts for diversity, inclusion, equality, and belonging is as crucial as the last innovations in psychotherapy and depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic disorder medicines. Responsible science means we can admit Western science created many issues it claims to save humanity from. It also means not letting the humanities deal alone with the global trails of tears it left behind and engaging in the decolonization of its field.

Indeed, Western science’s colonizing Eurocentric perception might have inadvertently built a time machine that has kept humanity in the past. This may be why so many scientists of European descent search for ways to travel to the future or, as seen from humanity’s perspective, the present. Time is relative, Einstein said, and so knew my “inferior” Animistic ancestors who didn’t see time as linear.

My father added, “Today, we eat cassava in Congo, but rice was our ancestors’ food. There was rice as long as one could see in their time. Even my grandma did not want to cultivate it during my time (in the colonized French Congo in the 1950s). She said the Mundelé (Europeans) still live here unconcerned while treating us like animals. Why wouldn’t they decide to capture us and send us again to Mpoto (overseas) if they need more money from us? They get as much as possible from the lands and move on when nothing is left. They could colonize Zulu (the universe) when nothing is left on Earth and still not see the problem with their destructive behavior. We do not eat rice because those people have not changed. Maybe they never will because they seem possessed like Nzumbi (tortured spirits that gave the word zombie when it crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved Bakongo). Otherwise, why are they still acting this way? They live in a different reality outside of Nseke (humanity). Grandma had some valid points. Some grandiose and ignorant behaviors in the West are baffling if we consider them from humanity’s perspective. The Lost Cause story isn’t only an American thing. All the cultures involved in the European colonization have a similar to justify continuing to invalidate humankind and validate themselves.”

Because of this deep ancestral dread of being exploited to death, my father and his brother were the first in the family to eat rice since the 19^th century when they moved to France in the 1960s to study architecture and medicine, respectively. Meanwhile, in my childhood in the 1980s and 1960s, my parents taught our siblinghood to fear the deep, unaddressed Western racial biases. They developed a visceral dread that the French school and child services would rob their children from them, as my mother experienced when the colonial system sent her away to a Catholic boarding school. As for today’s villages in Africa, they are often still away from the main roads, hidden from the help of the White saviors’ NGOs and their groundbreaking civilizing innovations.

My dad continued, “Colonization and globalization have depleted Africa since slavery. It will take centuries for the continent to recover if it ever does. Teaching the world to behave like Europeans is not civilizing humanity. It’s pure vanity. It’s about changing humankind to make humankind to our image so we can see only ourselves in humankind. No one knows what humanity would have become without European colonization. No matter how much today’s colonizers claim, it fares better in whatever lost cause narrative. The bottom line is colonizers saved no one because we do not save people we do not know or perceive. We control them and instead believe in our distorted savior image. Then, this false image becomes our identity and is more important than reality. We do everything to hold onto it to feel validated by lying to ourselves and invalidating others. It’s what those baffling lost cause narratives and rationalizing colonization are about. Many European descendants still believe it, but also some African descendants, like this Black student from Detroit. Dharmic religions call it Moha (delusion in Sanskrit), and there is no word in French.”

Indeed, delusion has no French translation. I learned it first in Indian Sanskrit in childhood, 3,000 years after India translated this human experience, and then in American English in adulthood, 605 years after English poet John Lydgate borrowed from Latin, the language from which French stems. As the African proverb says, “Patience can cook a stone.”  In the meantime, I’ve taken inspiration from where authentic creativity happens in humanity, way outside the Eurocentric time capsule.

“He who thinks he is leading and has no one following him is only taking a walk,” the African proverb. Unlike the inspirational power of creativity, the destructive strength of European colonization was that it forced many to follow.  My saddened father stressed African Americans called “Uncle Toms,” those traumatized enslaved African descendants who internalized the dehumanizing delusional colonial narratives about themselves. “Uncle Toms” were submissive to the European colonizer’s descendants and could betray humanity.

Meanwhile, the Kongo culture explained the enslaved African descendants had two Ancestors’ voices in them: the one who never wanted to be in America and the one who sacrificed their Africanness to survive and even thrive. Those two ancestral internal whispers were in constant conflict, torturing our missing families’ exiled souls.

Thus, some enslaved African descendants couldn’t acknowledge us. The only way for them to heal was for those two voices to speak as one. My Kongo father said, “This American student from Detroit hadn’t found harmony yet. It might take more generations to achieve that. Meanwhile, many suffering African Americans will continue to fight against each other. They will destroy their already fragile enslaved descendant communities.”

My father continued, “It hurts to think about what those Africans had to go through for their descendants not to recognize us or sometimes each other, or even the humanity within themselves.” As the dynamics sounded like an autoimmune reaction, echoing racism based on the race theory designed by Western science, my dad added, “We suffered a lot during the colonization in Africa. However, Africans in America suffered the most because colonization succeeded in changing their humanity, or at least their perception of it. They don’t feel African anymore.

He added, “Racism is a disease. How can Europeans leave Africans so traumatized and go on with their lives as if nothing happened? And the same colonial culture that made this mess yesterday does little to help clean it up beyond the surface.  It’s like the American system is designed to keep Black people down. It claims emancipation and Civil Rights but criminalizes enslaved African descendants and locks them up to eliminate the Black problem it created.”

As I was speechless, he continued, “Then, Western science drugs those traumatized people to help them cope with a biased system to which it contributed. It does little to change it because it benefits from it. It just produces band-aids and touts them as innovations. What’s the point of being cured of cancer today if my skin color gets me shot dead tomorrow? Why extending my life is my life is sufferance? Western medicine is designed for privileged people by privileged people who know nothing about reality beyond themselves. It’s like Samsara, a sick circle (the perpetual circle of suffering in Dharmic philosophy broken with knowledge, amongst others). But it’s like normal life in the West as if there were nothing to do. Self-education is critical to breaking free, not with the Wester education’s colonial indoctrination, but the self-enlightenment we reach when we learn different realities.”

I was too disheartened to reply that obliviousness and ignorance were rationalized pillars of Science, with a Capital S. Many scientists believed that disconnection from the human subjects on which they generate knowledge and repressing the observer’s emotions was the correct way to ensure objectivity. Linnaeus infamously never went to Africa when he described African descendants as lazy in his scientific classification, which is still in use today, minus the “minor” race blunder. Indeed, most scientists still believe classifying life through binary logic is best for processing reality.

In the 1990s, some humanities scholars called post-modernists and curious scientists challenged the relevance of traditional Western science’s reductionist approach, self-perception of ultimate objectivity, and knowledge authority. Those brave peers stepped into the same troubled waters as Semmelweis did two centuries ago when he met peers more interested in saving their egos than humanity.

So, the science wars started mainly within pure, innocent, unconcerned, and free academia. They opened the dialogue about the impact of science on society and left two opposite clans. Today, one expert-centric side maintains that Western science is an objective process that uncovers truths about the natural world, as it has been doing since at least Linnaeus’s time. The human-centric other argues that social, cultural, and political factors deeply influence Western science.

Meanwhile, for those affected by Western science’s cultural influence for centuries, meaning most of humanity, there is little transparency about how scientific innovations are made. As one of them, the only thing is to know if the innovations I’m using have been developed with an 18^th-century expert-centric mindset or including 21^st-century humanity. It can be a question of life or death, as we will see in the next chapters of this insightful story.

The slowness of Western science’s authentic progress for humankind means we still live with the causalities of centuries of scientists’ voluntary self-dehumanization and Western science’s disconnection from humanity. The latter led to notorious unethical medical studies on people that race theory and eugenics believed were inferior to humanity’s standard of purity: a wealthy, cis-heterosexual, slender, able-bodied, disease-free, educated White European male with steadfast Christian morality, rationality, meaning, unwavering European binary logic, also called humanity’s rationality or common sense, discriminative intelligence, and unbreakable emotional restraint.

Addressing contaminating colonial biases in individuals and the systems today can sometimes be as challenging as asking physicians to wash their contaminated hands and instruments in Semmelweis’ time, including, sadly, in healthcare.

Eurocentric science’s disconnection with humanity objectifies non-standard people, as my parents’ generation experienced when the colonized French Congo used Africans as lab animals in the 1960s. They had no idea if the drugs physicians gave them then were for treatment or experimentation, but they lost many friends whose lives were buried deep in Western science’s history. Their lives didn’t matter then and often still don’t today.

My parents’ ordeal echoed the enslaved African descendants on the other side of the Atlantic. The unethical Public Health Service syphilis study at Tuskegee (1932-1973) was likely one the most infamous examples. The physicians lied to the African Americans enrolled in the study that they were treated and instead observed the natural progress of the disease. It stopped only when Peter Buxtun, a concerned Jewish Czech American epidemiologist, contacted the press because his innocent, pure, unconcerned, and free management didn’t see the issue with the baffling study.

Even today, some predatory pharmaceutical companies and NGOs conduct unethical studies in Africa and other places Europe colonized where there is no or little regulation. Their moral compass rationalizes that they follow the local laws: the stone has been cooking long on this one.

In traditional Western science, critical thinking seems lost when understanding humankind beyond its uniform, trained, emotion-free workforce’s microscope and laboratory’s uniformized, controlled environment. Then, self-perceived objective scientists celebrate the groundbreaking results from this sanitized or even eugenicized environment. As in Linnaeus ‘ time, the uncritical outcome becomes humanity’s diverse reality.

Ethics and regulation are the critical disciplines that ask questions after science shoots innovation. After the Civil Rights, Decolonization, and Cultural Revolution, humankind joined the Western workforce that eugenics uniformized. Only then did science with a Capital S realize it might have practiced more magical thinking on most humanity and less evidence-based reality.

Pharmaceutical science regulation, my chosen field of expertise, became one of the applied science leaders to address Western science’s problematic disconnection to humanity’s reality. It’s been one of the fastest to ask questions to science to protect patients and humankind. It increasingly puts patients and humans at the center of its reality while learning to hear their long-silenced voices.

After the Civil Rights enactment, the US Food and Drug Administration became the leader in the West in requesting the inclusion of human diversity in medical research. Its diversified workforce also led scientific discussions about real-world data inclusion. If an institution set up by eugenicists could transform in the first country decolonizing from Europe, there may be hope for the rest of humankind who decolonized, too.

As an inspirational wise carpenter said 3,000 years ago, “The last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). Today, my health in Europe, the historical epicenter of humanity’s reality distortion, depends on how much the USA continued to decolonize and address systemic racism. It also hinges on the extent to which scientists of European descent can admit they might always be the last in the room to understand humanity’s authentic diversity and embrace what colonization lacks the most, and modern science is learning: humility.

The success of the Civil Rights and Decolonization movement illustrates how much many European descendants challenged the grandiose colonial narrative as anti-imperialist American Mark Twain did. Many want to be a part of humanity in a co-creative, equal partnership. They do so even if it means bursting the validating privileged, self-absorbed bubble that colonization’s binary logic designed for them in which many experts live. Those critical thinkers understand no one grows in their comfort zone, especially in this delusional time capsule where one can believe they can return to the past and make reality great again.

End of the first part of chapter 2.

To be continued.