We Are All African: Coming Home to Our Common Humanity

I want to start with a night I have carried with me for years, because I think it belongs at the beginning of this conversation more than anywhere else.

I was a hospital chaplain, called to a room in the middle of the night where a man was dying. I had learned by then what it felt like to open a door into a room where death was present and family was gathered. The way something in the room would shift slightly when I arrived, the way grief exhausted people would allow themselves one small exhale when another presence entered, whose only purpose was to hold the sacred weight of that moment with them.

This room did not do that.

The family did not look up. Their silence was not the silence of grief. It was something more deliberate, more constructed, a wall assembled quickly and with intention, the moment I appeared in the doorway. I stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the dying man, and I saw symbols on his body that told me everything I needed to understand about why I had been unwelcome before I spoke a single word.

There was a young woman near his bedside whose eyes, when they briefly found mine, held something that looked remarkably like an apology. Not for herself. For all of it.

I stayed a moment longer than I needed Not out of defiance, but out of a refusal to let that room have the final word about my right to be in it. Then I said quietly that I had prayed for their beloved, and that if there was anything further that they needed, they should have the nurses call me.

I walked out.

And in the hallway, the administrator pulled me aside. Not to manage a situation, but to make sure I understood the full weight of what had just happened. I was not, she told me, the first person of color that family had turned away that week. Throughout the days leading up to this night, they had refused care, refused presence, refused the basic human exchange of help offered and received, from every provider of color who had entered that room. Nurses. Technicians. Specialist’s. Everyone of color. An entire week of people deemed unworthy of giving their attention and skill to a dying man, simply because of the color of their skin.

I was the last. Because now there was no more time left to refuse anyone.

I stood alone in that hallway for a moment with the strangest feeling.

Not rage, though the anger was there. Underneath it, oddly, something that felt like grief…on their behalf.

What story had been handed to that man across a lifetime. Across generations. About who was fully human and who was not, that he carried it all the way to his deathbed? What had been done to him, and to his family, to produce that?

That question has never left me. And it is the question I want to sit inside with you today.

Here is a scientific truth that I believe has the power to reframe everything, if we let it land. Not just in the mind but in the body:

We are all African.

Not as metaphor. Not as poetry. Though it is that too. As biological, genetic, historical fact.

There is a woman scientists call Mitochondrial Eve, the matrilineal ancestor of every single human being alive on this earth today who walked the African continent approximately 200,000 years ago. Her DNA, passed from mother to child across every generation since. It runs through every human body regardless of skin color, nationality, language, or the particular patch of earth any of us call home.

Every person who has ever drawn breath on this planet is her descendant.

Every person.

Which means that the man in that hospital room, with his hate symbols and his family’s constructed silence, carried African DNA in every cell of his body. Which means that the entire architecture of racial hierarchy, the carefully constructed lie that some human beings are more fully human than others, is built on a foundation that the human genome itself directly contradicts.

We are not different species who learned to coexist. We are one family who learned to forget.

The forgetting did not happen randomly, and it did not happen naturally, and understanding how it happened is, I believe, the only way we can begin to find our way back.

When our ancestors first walked out of Africa and spread across the planet over thousands of years, they carried the full range of human possibility with them. Every capacity for tenderness and creativity and connection, every capacity for fear and competition and violence. What shaped which of those capacities became dominant, generation after generation, was largely environment.

The communities that settled in harsher climates, where resources were scarce and winters were brutal and the Black Death could move through a population and take half of everyone you loved in a single season….those communities developed survival strategies rooted in competition, in hierarchy, in the fierce protection of what was theirs against the threat of those who might take it. Not because of anything in their blood. But because of everything in their circumstances.

And those survival strategies, repeated across enough generations, became epigenetic inheritance. Patterns of threat response and resource hoarding and hierarchical thinking that got passed forward in the nervous system long after the original scarcity that produced them had passed.

This is not an excuse for what was done. Nothing excuses what was done.

But it is an explanation that moves us out of the language of evil, which leads only to more division and into the language of inherited trauma, which leads somewhere we might actually be able to go together.

The man in the hospital room was not simply a monster. He was a human being who had been handed a story about race so early and so completely, reinforced through so many generations of transmission, that it had become indistinguishable from reality. His nervous system had learned that the hierarchy was real the way all nervous systems learn. Through repetition, through relationship, through the encoding of what the people around you treated as true.

And somewhere in that room, a young woman’s eyes were saying “I’m sorry” to a Black female chaplain she had never met, which tells me that even inside the most defended and distorted inheritance, something in the human nervous system can still recognize the lie.

That recognition is the seed of everything.

Black History Month asks us, every year, to remember what has been done. To honor the resilience and creativity and extraordinary contributions of people who built whole civilizations, who created art and music and science and culture, who did all of this while surviving systems designed to deny their full humanity.

That remembering is necessary and sacred and not finished.

But I want to add something to it this year, something that feels urgent to me as a psychologist and a human being paying attention to the world we are currently living in:

We need to remember further back than the harm.

We need to remember all the way back to the truth. To the 200,000-year-old woman in Africa whose DNA we all carry. To the reality that every culture and civilization and human achievement in history was built by her descendants. To the understanding that the diversity we see when we look at each other is not evidence of separation but of an extraordinary, creative, continent-spanning journey that began in the same place and has always been, at its root, one story.

The technologies we have built, the languages we have developed, the music and the medicine and the architecture and the ways of understanding the sacred…. none of these are markers of racial hierarchy. They are expressions of what one human family, scattered across vastly different environments and challenges, was creative and resilient enough to produce.

We are not the branches competing to be the tree.

We are all the tree.

I am slowly working on something larger: a book called “The Lie We Inherited: Race, Trauma, and the World We Could Still Become” that will go much deeper into the epigenetic science, the historical construction of race as a tool of power, and the healing pathways that become available when we begin to treat racial division as the inherited trauma it actually is, rather than the biological truth it was always pretending to be.

But today, in this month, I simply want to offer this:

The first step toward becoming more fully human, wherever you are, whatever you look like, whatever story you were handed about who belongs to your family and who does not may be the most radical and the most simple step available to us.

Remember who you actually are.

You are 200,000 years old. You walked out of Africa carrying the seeds of everything that would become human civilization. You have survived ice ages and plagues and empires and every grief your lineage thought might be the last one. You carry that survival in your cells right now, reading these words.

And so does every other person on this earth.

That man in the hospital room. His family. The young woman with the apologetic eyes. You. Me. Every person we have ever feared or hated or dismissed as less than fully human.

All of us descended from the same mother.

All of us, always, one family finding our way home.

With love and hope and a deep belief in the world we could still become…

Nativ Elementz

Stay close, this conversation is just beginning.