Chapter 3: Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero – African proverb.

My father continued, “Humanity is interconnected: it is one. What happens to Black Americans is our concern, and it’s sickening to see us being treated this way in the USA. At least you and your sister might change something here in Europe so we, too, can do something to be less invalidated. You can get inspiration from Black Americans, but please never forget where you are from.”

America was a land of opportunities for those who survived it. Despite the African Americans’ struggles, my father instilled in me a sense of pride and inspiration for the often first racialized Black to succeed in the West, the pace he called home when he voluntarily immigrated from depleted Africa. This identification was critical since, in my childhood in the 1980s, most French media executives didn’t believe including humanity’s diversity mattered. To the anti-racist organization’s constant request for representation of humanity’s reality, the French elites replied that Indigenous French represented everyone. They clarified that discerning the different ethnicities, expressions of Western culture, and diverse experiences as the European American executives did in Hollywood’s narratives was racist.

Hence, American media portrayed diverse characters in France. African American movie characters usually represented African descendants, Asians, Pacific islanders, and any new-coming “non-Western” immigrants, except for the extraterrestrial aliens. The latter already had their dedicated science fiction genre. Black Americans showed me that African descendants could be African descendants, and other minorities could be police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and chief physicians in the West. They could also be front desk workers, salespeople, and other customer-facing workers. This seemed unreachable in France in the 1980s, so African Americans inspired me to achieve more in medical and pharmaceutical science than the French society implied I could.

My father said, “Many Black Americans can also get out of this toxic system with a plentiful dose of courage and determination, and not only in the movies. They often achieve the best in society, like Julian Abele, one of the West’s first architects of African descent.” 

Abele graduated from the Quaker-run Institute for Colored Youth (Cheyney University), a historically Black university. The latter welcomed the gifted African descendants the European mainstream excluded, as many other Black-focused organizations did to foster excellence, and the lost cause narrative wanted to cancel. Abele designed over 400 buildings, like the Havard’s Widener Memorial Library (1912-1915), several buildings at Duke University, and other landmarks, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1914-1928). Hollywood’s Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky (1976) immortalized the latter when the determined fighter climbed its steep steps and shadow-boxed to triumph.

In a multidimensional logic, Rocky Steps, as the popular culture called them, were also Abele Steps, as my architect father called them. He continued, “Those great achievements are proof of the Ancestors’ resilience. It was learned from one generation to another and came to fruition. Meanwhile, we still have a long road here, in France. However, I still submit my projects for tenders for public buildings – My Dad was one of the few racialized Black architects in the country in the 1970s after he graduated – Even if I do not get anything in my lifetime, it opens the doors for the next generations.”

His trembling, soft voice added, “Still, we are so far away in time, space, and experiences with the Black Americans that the only thing we have in common now is our skin color. They forgot too much about Africa.”

It felt like we lost our family three times, once when our beloved child was taken away from us, another time when her identity was taken away from her, meaning us, and a last time when she believed the European colonizers’ distorted narratives about Africa. Only European colonization could kill someone thrice: it was called Civilization, with a capital C, and Progress, with a capital P, like the P in the pinnacle of self-serving destructive materialistic creativity.

As Sir Lankan writer and anti-racist activist Sivananda said, “We are here because you were there.” No matter how much my father admired the success of many African American intellectuals, he feared we would also lose our identity in the West, the deadly, abundant place he chose to raise us.

Even today, Europe, the historical epicenter of colonization, race theory, modern eugenics, and White supremacy, struggles to understand the difference between assimilation and inclusion. Its traditional binary logic still often asks if we are one of another identity. Jewish, German, Swiss, Hungarian, American WWII refugee, physicist, and accidental philosopher Albert Einstein introduced the theory of relativity to the West 3000 years after India’s Vedas did. Yet, most Westerners found it baffling or obscure. So, multiple truths might never be innate to European descendants, but the concept can be learned and become second nature with a plentiful dose of courage and determination.

“The leopard does not change its spots,” the African proverb says about people living isolated in a time capsule. My dad used to say we might be poor in Africa, but at least we were free. In the Land of the Brave and the Free, enslaved African descendants and racial hierarchies were kept in check by the terrorizing successor of the cruel slave patrols and brutal vigilantes: the police.

Meanwhile, self-perceived, innocent, pure, and free people could roam unconcerned about the violent American colonial history and its evident repercussions in the present while, for many, enjoying generational wealth. Beautiful brides and elegant grooms could even seal their blessed destinies in Southern Belles’ blissful grand weddings celebrated on damned plantations that saw so many atrocities. I want to believe there is a special place in hell for those who are so reality-blind: it’s to live on Earth with their benighted selves.

Indeed, sometimes, the sheer modern colonial entitlement was so sharp that it burst some European descendants’ eyeballs. Some European immigrant descendants told Black Americans to “go back to Africa,” even if, generation-wise, the African Americans were the oldest immigrants. It was the overlooked side effect of centuries of post-slavery discriminative eugenic policies, also known as Western science’s 19th-century treatment to purify humanity. So, American laws barred immigration from Africa and privileged new European immigrant flows until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed non-European migrants.

Meanwhile, patient African Americans witnessed their country adopting one European migration wave after another, including the Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Jews, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans that eugenics first categorized as “semi-colored.” All became White after the self-declared good people bullied new immigrants to hate anything different from the perceived superior White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, including themselves. Then, disdaining Black Americans almost became the proud proof of perfect assimilation.

Despite many admirable advancements, as the Civil Rights Movement illustrated, many Black Americans still waited for their turn to belong in the only home they knew. After the European colonization of humanity’s reality, the self-claimed beneficial medicine that saved humankind from itself, belonging became the only way to survive and thrive. Thus, the highly educated African Americans my stunned dad met were unbelievable survivors and remarkable strivers, as, hopefully, our missing family was.

As the African proverb says, “If we stand tall, it’s because we stand on the shoulders of many ancestors.” My soulful father was the first generation to comprehend our orphaned missing child’s appalling fate in her adoptive home. To honor our ancestors’ unbreakable vow and make sense of an unspeakable loss, my dad integrated the meaningful accounts of enslaved Africans and their descendants into our oral tradition with an even heavier heart than when we left her behind.

“If the Europeans stand tall, it’s because they sit on everybody’s heads,” today’s African wisdom added after the European colonization and the racial hierarchy that Western science’s binary logic enabled. The latter’s race theory introduced us to the world as expandable people on whom all humans could sit. Colonization seemed a predatory enterprise seen from Africa and the territory European elites’ tried to appropriate, meaning most humanity.

Thus, Dad taught our young siblinghood to distrust self-glorifying Eurocentric Western narratives as they were a con artist’s labor.  He warned us about their overlooked tendencies to reduce humanity to a one-dimensional fight between good and evil, us versus them, civilization, progress and order versus savagery, backwardness, and chaos. He said, “It’s the European normal thinking. Meanwhile, the rest of humanity knows its truth.”

Binary logic’s reductionism fosters a false sense of certainty that misled European colonizer scientists when they described humanity’s reality. Eurocentric psychology considers binary thinking the simplest and most primitive intelligence. Millions of years ago, we needed to determine if an immediate situation was dangerous and survive in the wild. Then, we develop the capacity to perceive and build connections, known as multidimensional logic. So, Western science tried to move beyond binary logic but couldn’t because it’s a part of itself, at least seen from other world’s cultures based on and driven by multidimensional rationality. In the latter, science is culture, and culture is science.

Western science resonates with the lost cause’s old narrative’s binary thinking and discriminative approach to reality. It echoes when European descendants ask colonized people to have a linear perception of time by invalidating past wrongs and focusing on the right present. It mutters when European descendants assess colonization’s harm and benefits balance as if it was the medicine that saved humanity. It murmurs when they act emotionally stunted and are disconnected from the reality that they objectify and feel objective. Then, it whispers when they generate evidence proving their hypothesis with binary thinking. It mumbles when European descendants believe their exclusive conclusion is the sole valid and leave the responsibility for disproving their established reality to others. It purrs when they are challenged with non-binary ways to problem-solve. It hums when they are challenged to understand that their European rationality isn’t superior to other cultures but one of many. It sighs when it stray from intellectual honesty.

Western science speaks in the European descendants’ fear of disappearing by being diluted in humanity. It utters when their dehumanized perception promotes uniformity as if reality were valid only in homogenous lab conditions. It screams when they stress White purity, meaning supremacy, means the highest quality standard that could be jeopardized with one drop of impure Blackness, as the so-called mixed-race people experience. It roars when the status quo implies equilibrium, balance, and harmony, like in the infamous deep-rooted eugenic tree, which every discipline of Western knowledge helped to grow. Its distorted voice says, “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution. Like a tree, eugenics draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into a harmonious entity.” Eugenics is proof that shallow, self-absorbed innovation brings us deep to nowhere.

Meanwhile, stagnation means degeneration and death in African, Asian, and other non-Western scientific world cultures, and even in the Old Testament (Zephaniah 1:12). After Western science’s mindset cannibalized humanity’s reality, as a scientist, I can’t blame those embracing the lost cause narrative. They think like Science, with a capital S, after the latter declared objectified evidence-based reality produced by binary logic was the only valid for humanity. Its dehumanizing binary logic still believes in its superiority over multidimensional subjective emotion-based reality, meaning intellectual knowledge over emotional intelligence. It contributed to the technocracy in today’s world, in which only reality generated by European binary logic is valid, like evidence-based studies, social media algorithms, or so-called artificial intelligence, which could be called automated European binary logic if we had enough intellectual honesty.

Binary logic works well with materials, like dividing five apples amongst three people or vice versa. However, it is less fit to decide on human experience because there is no such thing as three-fifths of a human.

Multidimensional logic is the realm of multiple truths. So, I never heard my college-educated, African-raised dad say people embracing the lost cause narrative were wrong, unlike what they and Western science might say when we recounted global history and today’s reality through African oral tradition.

Instead, my enlightened father encouraged our siblinghood to understand the power of the “why,” a critical feature of authentic multidimensional logic. That’s why it is so suitable to approach humanity’s natural diversity.

So, my father asked us to grasp why people perceived reality as they did and how their binary logic could obscure many dimensions of reality. He prompts us to consider how it could harm us and them, meaning us. He taught us that the Eurocentric Western competitive debate culture of determining who was right or wrong fostered division and resentment. The winner took it all; the loser must assimilate to the victorious reality or be ignored, meaning marginalized. And when people elected the winner, it was called democracy. Then, the elected official compromised to maintain a peaceful appearance: the winning camp could have three-fifths of their desired reality and the loser a fifth.

I wouldn’t wish for anyone to be effectively disempowered and marginalized as binary logic does when applied to human experience. This happened to Eastern Europe in the 1990s when Western Europe won the Cold War. In its search for prosperity, the winner treated the loser as its un-decolonized perception only knew with binary logic. So, there is an overlooked dimension where it assimilated the East, erased its history, and devaluated its culture.

Anyone who doesn’t fit Western science’s historical narrow standard risks invalidation and disintegration. In the multidimensional Kongo culture, binary logic was about breaking and never reparation. It was the cultural context in which medical science, the Western way of healing, progressed. I wished the enslaved African descendants in the USA knew about this ancestral wisdom. It could help them understand the immense challenge they face in reconciliation.

My dad added, “One and one do not always have to be two. It can be three when the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. We can all win if we understand humanity is interconnected. I think Northern Europe tried this approach with its envied model of participative democracy and culture of consensus. However, it’s easy to find agreement in relative uniformity, as in Norway, Denmark, or another Nordic country. Humanity is highly diverse: there are as many realities as humans.” Indeed, the Sami were marginalized in the north while the Finnish minority was in Sweden, echoing the exact old science that characterized me and another African descendant as lazy.  He continued, “The challenge is to find commonalities while respecting individual diversity. It’s why the colonization was intellectually lazy; it flattened humanity to one reality, and voilà!” Ignorance and arrogance were the basis of colonial knowledge and are still the basis of Western knowledge when experts’ egos refuse humility and humanity, as Semmelweis experienced.

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid,” the African proverb says. It could add it was the case unless we live in a bubble where we can roam feeling innocent, pure, unconcerned, and free.

Warry that we live in the West, my Kongo father didn’t want us to wait for reality to hit hard for us to grow consciousness. So, he prompted us to seek out the authentic, layered tales hidden beneath the perfect heroic image of innocence and purity saving the world, also known as White saviors by decolonization scholars, humanity’s epitome of misguided help. He asked us to search for the big picture and understand invisible dynamics as African and other Animistic world’s multidimensional rationalities do, like the traditions of Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, Pacific Islanders, the Samis, and many others.

My inclusive dad was the first to tell me about Hungarian physician Semmelweis’s incredibly overlooked story. He learned it from African students who studied in the USSR, where the groundbreaking scientist became a national hero. Through our African oral tradition, my multicultural parents taught me many things about humanity that Western education and media’s one-sided written narratives didn’t. They told Eastern European history before Western Europe erased it when it assimilated the former USSR into its uncolonized perception. They invited me to challenge the uncritical perception of the educated, pure, innocent, unconcerned, and free ultra-minority who appointed themselves as humankind’s sole storytellers.

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid,” the saying attributed to Einstein stressed. In the rest of this enlightening account, Western science binary logic might feel like it did in this chapter: a fish climbing an invisible 200-year-old deep-rooted tree. Limitations give reality shape, while successes provide it with content. Still, Science, with a capital S, often celebrates more of its accomplishments than it reflects on its limits, as Semmelweis and eugenics’ blurred memory illustrates.

So, in the next stop of our insightful story, we will dive into a particular patient case of the ill-designed medicine in shining armor that the European colonization of humanity was: James McCune Smith. He was the first racialized Black physician born at the time Western binary logic considered him as three-fifths of a human. His resilience and creativity inspired my academic and professional journey.

As per multidimensional African oral tradition, we will continue to blend personal history and show how the big picture of humanity’s interconnected reality impacts individuals. Meanwhile, we will go with respecting the European binary logic’s appetite for facts while progressively including my other multidimensional culture, Asia, through my invisible Indian culture that nurtured my childhood.