Dr. Christopher DiCarlo

As published in Humanist Perspectives May 11, 2024

INTERVIEWER: JOURNALIST TROY BRIDGEMAN:  

Okay, so we are talking about ‘We’re All African’ 20 years later. So why don’t you kind of fill everybody in on what exactly the controversy was?

DR. DICARLO:

In 2005, I was teaching a Critical Thinking course at a Southern Ontario university to 93 students. It occurred to me with the research that I had done it at Harvard earlier in the 2000s that the evidence was overwhelming for human origins that the descent came from Africa. I mean, it was overwhelming. Spencer Wells was doing work with the Genographic Project, with National Geographic, and he was taking swabs of hundreds of 1000s of people around the world, and checking out their DNA and finding that all results led back to Africa. So, for the first time, we had genetic evidence. I bought one of these kits, and we used it on Matt, my youngest son, and it showed our haplotype descendancy went from Africa, and pretty much ended in Italy.

So the evidence seemed to me to be overwhelming: the fossil evidence, the anthropological evidence, the developmental evidence, the patterns, everything was there. And so it occurred to me, all humans descended from common ancestors from the African continent. Darwin predicted this. And now we had overwhelming evidence. And as a professor teaching critical thinking, I felt obligated to write something on the board to get the students interested and to get them talking and motivated. And those four words were: ‘We are all African’; not Africans, that seems to be of the present tense, but ‘African’ meaning that’s where we all came from in the past. And when I did that, a student put up their hand and said, “Yeah, but how do you know that?” Which is a great question.

So I said, “Well, all of the evidence points in that direction. And the way in which science works is you follow the evidence wherever it leads. When you look around the room here, and you see all these different features: different skin colours, facial features, and so on – all of that coalesces back in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. That means we’re all related. That means we’re all kind of like cousins.”

 And I found this was a really important message that no other professors were teaching. Because in a single sentence with four words, it cuts across all racial boundaries, and all human claims for privilege and status, and makes everybody equal in four words. And so I thought these were very, very powerful words, so I wrote them on the board. And I said, if evolutionary theory is correct, and I believe it is the best account for how we got in here, then it follows that we all must have descended out of Africa. And – so the student was indigenous and said, “But my people wouldn’t accept that.” I said, “I get that. There’s a lot of different Indian mythologies and spiritual beliefs about how their ancestors arrived, e.g. the turtle’s back and the sky woman, etc. There’s a lot of different ways in which indigenous peoples believed to have originated. But then she said, “Who’s right?” And as a professor, I couldn’t just say, “well, that’s not important or  that doesn’t even matter. Or you’re speaking your truth and I’m speaking my truth, which is meaningless to me as an analytic philosopher.” So I said, “Not your people, but how do we have this conversation?” Right? How do we do this? So I said, “Can you invite some elders into the classroom? And I’ll invite some scientific colleagues of mine. And we’ll discuss how we have this debate; how we have this conversation, when we have these so called culture clashes between science and spirituality.” And you know, the class erupted in applause. Everybody was keen on this. They were looking forward to this. But I didn’t hear back from the student. And I was up for a tenure track position. One had been created for critical thinking. And I had to be shortlisted and interviewed because of my seniority at this university. So it was looking pretty good. I had actually met with the VP. And she had shown me the job description. And I thought, “wow, this is wonderful.” But around 10 days later, I got a registered letter in the mail, opened it up, and it was from the Associate Dean of the University saying, basically, that a particular indigenous student and two fundamentalist Christian students in the class, got together and wrote letters, and accused me of being racist and Eurocentric which I didn’t understand. They basically said I was being racist, by foisting my ideas of what equality actually meant by claiming we were all African. And I was Eurocentric, because I was using science to prove my point. And this was 2005. So what had happened was no elders were coming into the class and no discussions were forthcoming. And what had happened was the position was retracted. It just sort of went away.

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