While I was throwing out old newspapers recently, I stumbled upon a TV Weekly, or whatever it’s called, which had an illustration relevant to PBS’s special on Evolution as its cover, since that program was supposed to be the highlight of that week.  When I saw it, it immediately reminded me of a qualm I’ve had since high school – why the funk is the fellow at the end of the evolutionary gamut not black, if the first humans on Earth were darkies?  The first man, as depicted on the chart has a ruddy complexion, but he’s still definitely a pale face.  Why the discrepancy?

The frickin’ “hu” in human is short for “hue,” which itself means pigment.  Everyone, at least in the scientific community, knows about Eve.  Every encyclopedia I’ve read acknowledges the people referred to as Australoid, known familiarly as the Aborigines, are the oldest “race” on the planet.  (Yea, those people that too few know founded the Indus River Civilization, migrated all the way from India to Australia millennia before the rest of the world knew what direction was north, and might have been North America’s first colonizers.)  Vitamin D synthesis as a description of how pale-skinned people (“Caucasoids,” “Mongoloids”) arose on our planet has been around at least 25 years.

So why, I emphatically posit again, haven’t I ever seen one stinkin’ illustration of evolution that got it right?!  Why have I never seen a brown personage at the end of the line of more and more erect-standing creatures?

Some white boy is going to comment, “Why do you care, [Harold]?  No one pays attention to that stuff.  Humans are human.  Who cares what color the first man was, if we are all here now?”

To that fellow, I reply: Shut your pie hole!  If the mistake is so innocent and “no one cares,” then accurate depictions of evolution should be ubiquitous.  If “no one cared,” there’d be no profit in distorting the truth that science has known for decades.  Furthermore, Mr. “We Are the (White) World,” it would probably be more insulting if the inaccurate portrait were indeed an oversight or haphazard mistake.  Such an oversight would lend credence to what sociologists, black literati and everyday folk have claimed ad nauseam – the world is white and the rest of us are invisible, or at best, insignificant.

Honestly, my ghetto-borne conspiracy radar hints to me that it’s a little deeper than that. 

My racial paranoia tells me the popular illustration of evolution is an insinuation that the white man is evolution’s final, finished, or ultimate product, while we darker-skinned peoples were just evolutionary “bumps” along the way.  Either that, or we, the big-lipped, nappy-haired, well endowed, abundantly melanin-blessed (or cursed, if you’re a black neo-con), are aberrations that somehow arose after the white masterpiece was complete.

Regardless of whether or not I’m imaginative, the glaring inaccuracy of the popular chart of man’s ascendance highlights the need for black textbooks in black schools, written by black scientists, black science shows and journals that steer us away from miseducation.  Where all my college grads at?

Harold M. Clemens is a freelance writer from Roxbury, MA.  He blogs at http://ghettouprising.blogspot.com.