"Black Darwin": Joseph L. Graves' Call to Justice

I struggled between, on the one hand, the values instilled in me by a mother who worked in rich people’s houses during the day, pulled a factory shift as night, and was always in church on Sunday and, on the other hand, my inflated vision of myself as an “evolutionary genius” that would shape the next stage of my career. It was at this time in my career that I began to think more seriously about how my knowledge and skills as an evolutionary biologist might be turned to addressing the issues that were contributing to the oppression of Black people. (A Voice in the Wilderness, Excerpt from Chapter 5)

…I began to think more seriously about how my knowledge and skills as an evolutionary biologist might be turned to addressing the issues that were contributing to the oppression of Black people.

The call: there is work to be done

I was born into a world of social injustice. We all are.  If I had been given the opportunity to speak to God before my birth, I would have asked “do I really have to go down there?” I mean of all the planets and universes in the multiverse couldn’t I have been assigned to one without racial prejudice? To be perfectly honest I might have asked not to be born “black.” In my youth I often found myself wishing I had been given some other fate. (A Voice in the Wilderness, Chapter 1).

Most people, for a variety of reasons, choose to accept that this is how the world must be. From an early age, I chose to reject that notion and devote my life and career to advancing the cause of justice. For me that meant not just learning how the biological world worked but also deploying that knowledge to the causes of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, releasing the prisoners of all forms of oppression, and bringing about true community among all people. Precious few of my colleagues, in my discipline or in the academy as a whole, have opted to engage in this struggle.

Most people, for a variety of reasons, choose to accept [the world as it is]. From an early age, I chose to reject that notion and devote my life and career to advancing the cause of justice.

I wonder how much of this inaction comes from observing the undemocratic and unjust world as it is and thinking that our species and its societies evolved this way (and could have evolved in no other direction). (A Voice in the Wilderness, excerpt from Chapter 14)

Before I was called “Black Darwin,” I was called a bunch of other things, more often than not simply “nigger.”  My parents grew up during violent Jim Crow segregation in Virginia.  I was born in New Jersey in the same year that Emmitt Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi.  I was raised to have careful deference to white folks.  My parents knew all too well what could become of us without such training.  My family, like so many African Americans, had survived the oppression of American structural racism through their faith.  The house I grew up in was two doors from St. Luke’s African Methodist Episcopal. Paul Robeson’s father had once been the minister there.  I was baptized in Bethel Baptist Church of Westfield, New Jersey.  It was aligned with the progressive Baptists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  I grew up on sermons inspired by the Reverend Martin Luther King.

Here for a reason

When I opened a copy of On the Origin of Species as a student in high school, I had no idea that I would pursue a career as an evolutionary biologist. A series of unforeseen contingencies landed me in the discipline of evolutionary biology. Later, when I began my Ph.D. work, I didn’t know there had never been an African American who had identified primarily as an evolutionary biologist. The personal and psychological cost of being the first in the field was high, not just for me but also those closest to me. Still I feel I was placed here for a reason. Like John the Baptist, I was called on to give voice to the truth. (A Voice in the Wilderness, excerpt from Conclusion)

College was a culture shock, as so many of my classmates were from the top 5% of their high school classes and came from affluent families.  I struggled as an undergraduate, in part because of a lack of advising, and certainly because there were no African American role models in the science departments.  It was at this point in my academic career that the roots of “imposter syndrome” began to sink in.  People rarely said that you shouldn’t be there to my face, but sometimes professors did say it.

The personal and psychological cost of being the first [African American] in the field was high, not just for me but also those closest to me. Still I feel I was placed here for a reason.

Through my struggles in high school and college I had become lost in what felt like a wilderness.  The crushing injustices of my existence (and all those around me) had made me question the existence of God (or if God was good).  King and Malcolm had been murdered; America had dropped thousands of tons of explosives on innocent people in Vietnam, looked the other way while apartheid continued to steal the lives of Africans, prisons swelled with African Americans who never really had a chance to escape the school to prison pipeline, and it was clear that the powers that be really did not want me to succeed in my chosen profession.  Deep down inside I made excuses about all that was aligned against me, but I could never shake the feeling that it was really my own inadequacy that was at the root of my problems.