Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson On Why White People Refuse to Admit They’re Actually Black

What happens when you confront centuries of social conditioning with raw evolutionary data? You get Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest viral interview on Club Shay Shay, where he delivered a staggering scientific truth bomb that proves why our modern concept of race is an absolute illusion.

On the June 4 episode, the beloved astrophysicist joined host Shannon Sharpe to discuss everything from ocean depths versus deep space, the reality of the dinosaur-killing asteroid and alien life. But the conversation took a profound turn when Sharpe asked Tyson to explain what actually separates Europeans, Asians and Africans, aside from the geographic regions they come from.

“Well, we all came out of Africa,” Tyson quickly replied. “Humans’ origin is in Africa. There is no dispute about that, at all.” The physical evidence backing Tyson’s claim is etched directly into the Earth.

According to the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, the fossil record definitively establishes Africa as the birthplace of human species following the discovery of the famed 230,000-year-old Omo Kibish fossils in Ethiopia. Despite that fact, many white people simply refuse to acknowledge their Black roots—and Tyson explained how they manage to do so.

He described how you’ll meet an “Italian,” but when you ask them where they were born, they answer: “America. Where were your parents born? Brooklyn. Where was their parents born? Italy. I’M ITALIAN!”

“You see what they’re doing? They’re [white people are] going back their tree, finding a place that soothes their need to have some kind of an association, and they stop there,” Tyson added. Sharpe replied, “Even if they never been to that place!”

But Tyson says the conversation about your lineage shouldn’t just halt with one’s grandparents. “What I tell them all is, ‘Why don’t you keep going?’ Just keep going! And if you keep going, we’re all African.” Ooop!

After a few seconds of silence to let that fact really sit in your spirit, Tyson added that for everyone—including white people—”there is an ancestor of yours that is African, if you go far enough back on the tree. But you stop in Sweden. You stop in Italy, and you stop in Poland. Keep going back—the human tree of life traces back to Africa.”

Tyson’s breakdown exposes the arbitrary walls society builds around identity. Stopping the conversation about lineage at European or Asian borders is just bad science. By tracking our collective DNA all the way back to its true African origin, he strips the power away from centuries of manufactured racial division.

Later in the interview, Tyson explained the world’s divide.

“Even though [Christopher] Columbus was a dick, the most important thing he did was reconnect two branches of the human species that had been separated for 10,000 years. Had that never happened, there’s a precise setup for biological evolution to have a branch separate away from the branch that got it there.”

He added: “That’s why Australia’s animals are so weird. Australia separated from the mainland long ago on an evolutionary time scale so they got kangaroos, [snakes] with venom, stuff the rest of the world never seen or heard of.”

But while geographic isolation once dictated the entire course of natural history, modern technology has completely disrupted the evolutionary clock with a shortcut.

“Everybody is integrating with everybody,” Tyson said. “Thanks to airplanes.”