Neil deGrasse Tyson

I watched a really cool interview last night on our local PBS station. African American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was being interviewed. First off, I find science fascinating. Not as fascinating perhaps as my wife (though I should probably strike that comment; I think we are just interested most in different disciplines). In high school I was not on an academic track that gave me a lot of science classes. I thought the classes sounded cool (and routinely helped one of my friends cram for her chem class) but I was afraid of the math required. Math came hard to me when I was young. Partly this was due to severe illness keeping me out of school for vast periods of time when I was in elementary school. I was tutored but there were significant gaps in the building blocks needed for a solid math education. Part of it also was a result of our family moving to the western part of our state where the school I attended approached the subject totally differently, leaving me at sea as numbers seemed to float past meaninglessly.

My mom's response was to tell me I was just like her and she was always horrible at math. It was easy to buy into that. Easy because I loved her. Easy because it meant I didn't have to try and work hard and learn this stuff; I was genetically predisposed not to. That decision (which I thankfully reversed in college) shut me off from several of the higher level science courses that required more than Algebra II as a prereq.

Still, I was reading anything written by Carl Sagan in my free time and watched science oriented shows on PBS. I adored Carl Sagan. He made science understandable to people like me who had a passion but not a lot of scientific training. I adored him even more after listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's interview last night.

At 9, this man decided he wanted to be an astrophysicist. That boggles my mind. At 9 I had no clue what I wanted to do the next day, let alone the rest of my life. He spoke of how visits to the Haydn Planetarium opened his mind and soul to the night sky and the wonders of the universe. At 17 he was accepted to Cornell University but wasn't sure that he wanted to go. Carl Sagan wrote to him personally and invited him to tour the school. He did, and had a tour of the school with Sagan and it was Sagan's personal attention to him that was a primary force in his decision to attend that school.

Like Sagan, deGrasse Tyson is a passionate scientist with a real gift for making the subject fascinating and understandable to folks like me. Unlike Sagan, he is also African American. Yet he doesn't consider himself a "premier African American astrophysicist". He considers himself a premier astrophysicist who also happens to be African American. He made the distinction abundantly clear in the interview and it made sense. There is not a different way that scientists who are black look at their discoveries as opposed to their caucasian counterparts.

Yet he also addressed racism and the subtle ways racism is evident in society. He felt pressure to follow a sports ability instead of his scientific leanings. Though he developed a talent for wrestling, he was ambivilent about whether this was just something he did almost to conform to a societal pressure. It did seem to allow him to walk with relative comfort in both worlds, as he described himself as a jock nerd. LOL Those terms seem so mutually exclusive to me and I wonder if that is my "white" perspective showing.

He noted he never was stopped by a security guard when he went to the gym late at night but was if he had been entering his office. I get the impression the gym and office were in the same building. He spoke of white colleagues who had to rationalize in converation with him about his findings; essentially saying they could have come to a particular conclusion themselves if they had wanted to. There was a clear undercurrent to him that the mindset that black people are dumb and athletic and white people are smart was driving their responses.

It was heartening to me that he isn't bitter. He is phenomenally successful. And, he feels that things have improved greatly in the last ten years. I hope he is right because I want my kids to have opportunities to follow their passions whatever they are. I admire deGrasse's ability to push past subtle negativity and racism and follow his dreams. And I want to give my kids the strength to do that if and when they need to.