“A Greater Truth than Any Other Truth You Know”: A Conversation with Professor Sylvia Wynter on Origin Stories

Sylvia Wynter is an emeritus professor from Stanford University. She is also an essayist and creative writer whose work is deeply informed by the twentieth century Anti-Colonial Movement and the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power Movement leading up to the establishment of Black Studies. Professor Wynter’s work proposes a new definition of the human as a hybrid being, clarifying that we are more than physical and purely biological beings. In calling for a science of origin stories, she asserts that we must seriously consider the reality that we are composed of both story and flesh, and thus re-imagine the relationship between the narratives we craft about who we are, as well as what we are for, and the structure of the material world.

Editors’ Note: Joshua Bennett and Jarvis Givens met with Professor Wynter (b. 1928) at her home on January 25 and 26, 2019 to reflect on the 50th Anniversary of Black Studies, considering both the past and futures of this metadiscipline. The excerpts from our two-day conversation have been edited for clarity and length.

Sylvia Wynter: So, if you could just tell me briefly, how did you both come to do what you do? What you chose to study?

Joshua Bennett: In terms of our individual projects, or this project?

Sylvia Wynter: The individual projects.

Joshua Bennett: It began with family, for me. I came into the academy to look at the intersection of disability studies and black studies, to think about how black people with disabilities had historically appeared in literature. But once I got to graduate school at Princeton, I realized that I was interested in a much larger question about literary figurations of blackness; about the figure of the black as always already subhuman. So I began to extend my questions around disability to this question of black people as a subgenre of the human.

Sylvia Wynter: Yes.

Joshua Bennett: And then how they’d written about other subgenres. How did they write about plants, or animals? How did people once considered commodities write about other living commodities?

Sylvia Wynter: So, you were able to bring the disability question as well … and to see how they coalesce.

Joshua Bennett: Right.

Sylvia Wynter: If in different forms.

Joshua Bennett: Absolutely.

Sylvia Wynter: And I would say that the figure of the black one is the total form. I may be wrong, but I do believe that.

Joshua Bennett: No, I think that’s right.

Sylvia Wynter: Very good. And you?

Jarvis Givens: So, Josh and I met just a couple of years ago, after graduate school. I’m from Compton, California. I didn’t know much about what Black Studies was before I went to college. I was actually a business major in undergrad, but I had a professor at UC Berkeley who kind of changed my entire trajectory. I took her course on African Americans in the Industrial Age. She’s a historian. Her name is Ula Taylor.

Sylvia Wynter: Is she white or black?

Jarvis Givens: She’s a black woman.

Sylvia Wynter: That’s good, okay. But you see what I mean? They’re bringing the black, the struggle for entrance into the universities. See how you can’t separate it?

Jarvis Givens: Then when I got to graduate school—I got my PhD in Black Studies from UC Berkeley—I became interested in questions about education. I had read Carter G. Woodson, not formally in school, but for a student organization I was a part of. And then in graduate school I came to learn how central Woodson was to Black Studies, before Black Studies was a formal thing in the university.

Sylvia Wynter: Exactly.

Jarvis Givens: I became fascinated with his textbooks, actually. The fact that he wrote textbooks from outside of the academy, from outside of the school system, as a way of kind of critiquing-

Sylvia Wynter: Very good. Because he’s re-writing their epistemological order.

Jarvis Givens: Yes.

Sylvia Wynter: Of course.

Jarvis Givens: And so I became interested in thinking about black teachers as intellectuals and as people that are trying to offer a counterreading of both the word and the world. Woodson is an iconic example of that. Many people only think of him as a historian, but what I really appreciate about your work is you always center him as an educator and theorist, because he was first and foremost a schoolteacher.

Sylvia Wynter: Let me refer you to this, because I discuss it. Actually, this’ll surprise you, I started writing for the Institute of the Black World, a book called Black Metamorphosis. It was largely about the way in which Africans come over here, different tribal peoples, and in a sense undertake a tremendous metamorphosis in the United States. He becomes something now that’s called an American. But he’s also going to have to transform this world.

Sylvia Wynter: I write about this in the book. About Frederick Douglass being, of course, being maltreated by Covey, and Covey is not the owner, but the guy who’s running the thing. And there comes a moment where he meets another black person that has carried over African counter-belief systems, and told him about the power of the leaves, of plants.

Sylvia Wynter: And so, when Mr. Covey sets off to beat him again, he stops. And he fights him. And now what is happening … think about what scientists have told us about neurochemical mechanisms, right? And so, a thing like the belief in that leaf giving you power would have also had that literal neurochemical effect. And so he fights him, beats him. That’s what I was writing about. But at the same time I was trying to teach. I wasn’t always able to spend time writing specifically about things like this, because we were supposed to be focusing on Spanish and Portuguese literature.

Joshua Bennett: Right. How did you come to this vision? I mean, even thinking about your reading of Covey, reading that through a certain kind of science studies lens, how did you come to that way of reading literature?

Jarvis Givens: It almost feels like that’s something you’re offering as a kind of call to action for Black Studies. Because there’s understanding as to why there is suspicion of the sciences when it comes to black people, given how the sciences have been used to define black people as this subgenre, if you will.

Sylvia Wynter: But when we say science, we have to be

Jarvis Givens: Precise.

Sylvia Wynter: Careful in a sense, because … let us say as far as the physical sciences are concerned, we don’t have anything to fear from them. It’s when you come to what are called the biological sciences, where you find some of this really profound ideology. When we were growing up as colonial students, every colonial kid will tell you that’s what we were taught. That picture is in all our minds, if we had ever been colonial, that was in our minds. [Pointing to an image depicting Darwin’s theory of evolution; portraying the passage from ape to man.]

Jarvis Givens: In your schools, did you still have this image?

Sylvia Wynter: Of course, of course. I still remember it back, back in the United States. We also placed ourselves according to different degrees of shade. Because this was the whole ostensibly Darwinian-

Joshua Bennett: Vision.

Jarvis Givens: The half-science, half-myth.

Sylvia Wynter: Yeah, and what he describes as techniques of persuasion. Persuading blacks that they are nothing, not the same as whites, and so what is the damage it’s going to do to whites who have never considered these things? You understand what I mean? Because now, for the first time whites are beginning to see that some members of the black community end up in these high positions. So that is what this current horror, this menace, is tapping into. The fact that so many whites are not prepared to live in a world in which all humans are equal.

Sylvia Wynter: And although you do have the jobless poor, they won’t accept that they should be jobless poor. We have been conditioned. This is one of our most pressing issues: how are we going to deal with the separation between your fate and the fate of the jobless poor. You’re going to have to think, strangely enough for the first time, to agree in human terms. These are ecumenically human terms.

Sylvia Wynter: And this is what brought me to David Christian’s Maps of Time. We exist in origin stories. To give you a brief example of the problem, go back to medieval Europe. What is an origin story? There’s this central conflict between affliction and cure that is central to all these origin stories. What would you think the affliction was in the Adam and Eve story?

Joshua Bennett: Sin?

Sylvia Wynter: Yes. And sin that was explicitly tied to sex and sexuality. Okay. And so, in the medieval order, the clergy were celibate. The idea of eating the apple was symbolically linked to sexual intercourse, okay? In the medieval order, you had an entire world structured on the terms of that origin story.

***

Jarvis Givens: I would love to hear more about your early educational experience under British colonial rule. Because even when you come back and talk about this image becoming ingrained in a particular kind of way, it’s almost as though—and even the way in which you come to comprehend what Woodson is offering—it seems like it’s all very much routed through your own understanding of how education-

Sylvia Wynter: The ideological imperative between colonialism and what you might think of as a sort of inner colonialism. Both of them are structured in a hierarchical order. We have to think about the way this system trains us to think that this form of relation was logical; everybody in that order would come to think of the black as literally the bottom of everything.

Sylvia Wynter: I think the word native is useful here. Because, for example, in Caribbean we were native subjects. So this would be like a neo-colonial thing that we were suffering before we had our anti-colonial movement. So, I guess that’s how I see it. That’s also something that you may want to work on.

Jarvis Givens: In terms of thinking about the relationship between native studies and black studies? Or the relationship-

Sylvia Wynter: Yes, because … And this is the thing that I think will be the most powerful. When the slaves were brought, they were bought and sold as piezas, things. The only ones that are going to be distinct—meaning a total commodity—are going to be black slaves. The pieza was the norm, was a certain young man of a certain age. Sometimes two young men or three young men would make one, or one or three women would make one, that kind of thing

Jarvis Givens: It’s a unit of measurement.

Sylvia Wynter: And here is where I think race comes in. That makes it impossible for the white American to ever conceive that they owe everything, the land, and of course they owe the labor.

Jarvis Givens: Yes. So the native, the settler, the slave, a kind of triad. A founding triad for how we understand the origin story of America.

Sylvia Wynter: We are going to have to, in a sense then, I’m saying that one can only by reevaluating itself in terms of the origins inside the human species. That is also what Woodson was saying. About the way that white racism becomes logical. It was part of an origin story.

Sylvia Wynter: You see what I’m saying?

Joshua Bennett: Yes. But how do we persuade other people of what they haven’t lived, right? How do we get this across, this story?

Sylvia Wynter: What you have to say has to be a greater truth than any other truth you know.

Sylvia Wynter: And that’s what I’ve been struggling with. I’m not sure if I’ve achieved it but I have pushed entirely to that, and it’s not like I’m saying this is the only work black studies has been doing, or that this is the only thing the writers have been focused on.

Jarvis Givens: Is that the project of black studies? Is the central project of black studies to transform our understanding of what it is to be human?

Jarvis Givens: What do you make of certain, I guess, pushback that people might have against this idea that … what does it mean to put this burden on black people to assume the moral responsibility of the world in a particular kind of way? Is that not too much to bear?

Sylvia Wynter: It’s not the moral responsibility, really. I think in a funny way, it’s almost like—think of Copernicus. The Copernicus type of responsibility. A new way of knowing. It then has more implications. Think of what students will know generally when they realize, you began as piezas, and it is from piezas that you’re transforming yourselves into the beings you have become.

Sylvia Wynter: And so you are trying now to free yourself. And what I want to suggest to you is that in your freeing yourself, you have to free the human itself. And that can only be done, literally, by what I propose; the science of origin stories. Because we are hybrid, both bios and mythoi.

***

Sylvia Wynter: This is a very good moment. And what you’re doing is very important.

Joshua Bennett: And are you saying, too, that we need to cultivate that sort of intellectual courage among others?

Sylvia Wynter: Exactly, because you’re going to find that somehow, your issue being a pieta, is also a generally human issue because they’re still creating pietas all over the world.

Sylvia Wynter: I entered the American university system at UCSD, and then I got the appointment at Stanford and then I came to Palo Alto. And at that time, just about the same time, Demetrius was working on his Ph.D. and the two Jasons, they were all originally going to do all the disciplines and then I think they’ll tell you about it when they heard about my classes and they started coming. But what happened, the thing we had that was a movement that brought us together, was the terrible moment of the Rodney King beating. I think whenever you write, you should have pictures of that constantly. It was a crucifixion.

Sylvia Wynter: And then, on the radio we heard that whenever the police were told that somebody was calling about the trouble in their household, and the people were black—or if they were white prostitutes—they would say "NHI": no humans involved. So, we accepted that, and the students had a journal, so they would be able to tell you more about that. I then wrote an open letter to my colleagues, “No Humans Involved.” In a sense, meaning that all knowledge should be addressed to that concept.

Sylvia Wynter: And of course, I never got any answer from my colleagues. Since then, it’s been taken by other people as being published without any payment or anything for it.

Jarvis Givens: The essay?

Sylvia Wynter: Yeah. Yes.

Joshua Bennett: Oh, wow. I’m sorry.

Sylvia Wynter: But I don’t mind because, in a way, it was a public thing.

***

Sylvia Wynter: Legesse says in every order there is a liminal concept That is, in the structural sense, there’s an inside and an outside. The black men that get killed by the police, they inhabit a liminal category, because as blacks [generally speaking], we are no longer uniformly held in liminal categories. The ones that bear the brunt are the jobless poor ones.

Sylvia Wynter: And so that’s one of the problems you’re going to have to think about, how can your struggle context be linked to the jobless ones? I want to say something to you that might seem overoptimistic. Think about Langston Hughes, who you know they now have featured in the African American Museum.

Sylvia Wynter: What I found so interesting, they have a lovely line that they put up from Hughes: “The land that has never been yet— And yet must be.” That’s the land you’re going to fight for. You see? The land that’s not been yet.

***

Joshua Bennett: When were you awarded the honorary doctorate?

Sylvia Wynter: Beg pardon?

Joshua Bennett: The doctorate degree? When did Kings College give you this?

Sylvia Wynter: Actually, just the other day.

Joshua Bennett: Oh, so it was very recent.

Sylvia Wynter: In October, because the students had fought for it, you see. When I had to write a reply that’s when– It’s very difficult, in a sense, because you’re not expecting something like this at the end of your life.

Jarvis Givens: Why was it difficult to write the response?

Sylvia Wynter: Because I had to put forward my original idea, which is that– I just found it difficult, maybe that, also I wasn’t back in California where I had all my students near me, several students near me, all their students’ students. They would come and help with things.

Jarvis Givens: So, does your son live nearby?

Sylvia Wynter: My son, he lives here, that’s why I came to Texas.

Jarvis Givens: Oh right, right, right.

Sylvia Wynter: Because I have to have someone to bury me. And I have a daughter, but I thought it was better that he should do it, so I came to—the responsibility should be his—so I came and I’m finishing my last years here.

***

Sylvia Wynter: Our analysis has to focus on the order of things, the order of knowledge and then you’d have to say "what order of knowledge or what world are we contemplating?"

Sylvia Wynter: And that’s where the idea of the black metamorphosis comes in: the role that the black American would play in today’s Africa. And one of the saddest things of my life is that what used to be the African and the black American thing, is no longer there. One of your duties I think, will be to expand it. To let your work here go back to Africa itself.

Joshua Bennett: Are you at all worried about the dangers of what’ll happen if we can’t get a new origin myth together? Are you worried about what will happen if we have advanced forms of artificial intelligence, for example, but still have these old origin myths that are affecting how we think about the world?

Sylvia Wynter: I do know there’s a tremendous danger with artificial intelligence. That’s why I call for a science of our origin stories. Consider the African initiation ceremonies, as with the Dogon that Ogotemm^eli speaks of. They would have had to have an ideology that would convince the young men to give up their biological life. For the symbolic life. And so, let’s think about the present day. You are blacks and you go through a college, and you could very well be so proud of having your PhD and so on, that if you’re not too careful you might become proud of being normal. Not that you are saying that you are white. But that you are being the norm.

Jarvis Givens: And you went through that initiation. To become that …

Sylvia Wynter: Exactly. So that is why your concept was so heartening. And the fact that you could look back at the whole of black writings as a legacy. And I think gradually as you begin to think globally, you begin to look at all of those who struggle. And you begin to eventually conceive of that group as a whole, as a species. And imagining the writing of black experience as a central element of the story of where the species begins.

Sylvia Wynter: And so that is all part of the heresy I’m trying to describe. And also why I wanted you to look at that essay by David Bradley You read that essay, right?

Joshua Bennett: Yes. It’s an incredible piece of writing.

Sylvia Wynter: I’m trying to write on him. Because at that time he had given up hope. Right? He’d given up all hope at that time. At that time in history. You know? And as I said, then you get to see a different side of the divide. When, you know, it has more or less become established, right, that black stories exist. What I see is recognition of black studies, therefore, as veridically human knowledge. You see?

[Professor Wynter begins reading an excerpt from Being Human as Praxis]

Sylvia Wynter: “C'esaire counterproposed a new human scientific (rather than only natural scientific) order of knowledge. This would be able to deal, for the first time, with the hitherto unsolved phenomenon of human consciousness.” His primary hypothesis is therefore worth citing at length here:

Sylvia Wynter: Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge … . A view of the world, yes; science affords a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view.

Sylvia Wynter: Physics classifies and explains," that would be Copernicus. "but the essence of things eludes it. The natural sciences classify, but the quid proprium of things eludes them." That is the real theme.

Sylvia Wynter: It’s really about the science of art and stories. You’re going to see that. And then he says, "More and more the word promises to be an algebraic equation that makes the world intelligible. Just as the new Cartesian algebra permitted the construction of theoretical physics, so too the original handling of the word can make possible at any moment a new theoretical and heedless science that poetry could already give an approximate notion of."

Sylvia Wynter: You read a poem and see what he’s getting at. Yeah. All kind of meanings. Or look at least to a good rap song! Listen to a good and clever rap song, and you’re going see the same. And it’s the word.

Joshua Bennett: Jarvis needs to hear this. ’Cause he’s not a fan of rap. I am though. But I think this is right.

Jarvis Givens: Joshua is a poet.

Sylvia Wynter: Oh, you’re a poet?

Joshua Bennett: I am. Yeah.

Sylvia Wynter: I see. I see. Well, you have to listen to the poets.

Joshua Bennett: That’s good advice. Thank you.

Sylvia Wynter: Naturally, not all of them are amazing.

Jarvis Givens: No. No.

Sylvia Wynter: But when they are good, they are good. You know? And in one of my papers I quoted—

Joshua Bennett: Nas?

Sylvia Wynter: A rap thing, because it was so good. It got to the heart of what I’m trying to say. And he’s saying it in five or six lines.

Jarvis Givens: Yeah. About the CIA.

Sylvia Wynter: Every poem says things that you have to break down to explain. And because you know so much … you hear it, but you’re responding to it with everything within you.

Sylvia Wynter: You know. But they are really good. And, like I said, with Nas and people like that, in just a few small words he gets the whole thing you just shoved into a much longer passage of prose, right?

Joshua Bennett: There’s a commitment to the distillation of language there that’s central to the practice itself.

Sylvia Wynter: The study of the word becomes a matter of singular importance. So what I say is to study your origin stories. You have to accept the idea that we are hybrid beings. And so, you can say that, "Either I am wrong on this, or if I’m right it is really a meaningful transformation." You understand what I mean? If I am right. And by the way, If I’m right, it’s nothing that’s due to me. Because I always truly believed that everything I am comes from what I’ve been taught to read. And I’ve read enormously since then.

Sylvia Wynter: In fact, I have just ordered a brilliant new biography on Frederick Douglass for my grandson. He read Malcolm’s book and told me that he wept.

Joshua Bennett: Wow. How old is he?

Sylvia Wynter: He is about 13 now. He wept. And so I got a wonderful biography of Frederick Douglass for him.

Joshua Bennett: The new one! By David Blight?

Sylvia Wynter: He loves history. That’s his favorite subject.

Jarvis Givens: So, you said when you first began writing stories, all of the stories took place in England.

Sylvia Wynter: We never thought that we could write about ourselves. That’s what colonialism did.

Joshua Bennett: Can I ask what you were reading when you were five? You said you were five years old …

Sylvia Wynter: No. I was really lucky. Because my older brother and I, we had a grandfather whom I thought might have been … He would get into trouble later on, but he was very ambitious. When we went to spend holidays in the country, because we used to live in the town and they had a farm, and he would hire a young elementary school teacher to teach my brother, who was the one he was pushing. You know, but I was tugging along, right?

Sylvia Wynter: And so I happened to learn to read very early. I can’t remember when it was. But I do know that I was reading very early. Everything that I am has come from reading.

***

Sylvia Wynter: You can’t find consciousness as long as you think that the humans are only biological beings. You can’t put your fingers on it.

***

Jarvis Givens: And you’re saying it’s distinctly because of black people’s alienation within the current world of knowledge in a way that’s not analogous to any other form of alienation that makes black people uniquely situated in order to provide this kind of counter-reading of the world, or alternative form of knowledge?

Sylvia Wynter: Yes, yes, yes. That’s what I mean. But there’s also a far more positive thing. Blacks are the first humans to come into existence. They have existed for an immeasurable length of time. They would have had to have struggled with, for example, by the time you come to the King on the Congo, and you have this fully developed initiation system, the analog of, let us say, Christianity and alternatives we can say, and in fact I would want you to say, Catholic Christianity, when you have a total form of Christianity, you know what I mean, and so the whole idea of baptism is that you’re a new man when you come under it.

Sylvia Wynter: But what would have had to have been invented is this ceremony that is described in [points to Conversations with Ogotemm^eli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas] … you see what I mean? So this would have existed long before Christianity or any other thing. The human has to be a hybrid being for that to be centrally important. Try and get that point. If we are hybrid people, bios and history.

****

We listen to a 1981 recording of Professor Wynter being interviewed on Soundings while a fellow at the National Humanities Center, an excerpt is included below.

Sylvia Wynter [1981]: If you look at Jefferson, Jefferson pointed out that to be a free man, you either had to be white or you would have had to have bred your blood up to a point where you are 15/16ths white. So, I am examining to show the … what I call the Social Technology, or the Social Rhetorical System by which white and free comes to be perceived at affective and competent levels as being linked. So, in defending whiteness, you are defending freedom. Whiteness then comes the function at two levels, as an empirical fact and as a metaphysical fact.

Sylvia Wynter [1981]: Now, to understand the terrors of racism, you must understand that anybody who is socialized to sense these things metaphysically and empirically will, in defending whiteness, be defending everything that they see as good and as beautiful in the American reality.

Wayne Pond [1981]: Now, when you say empirically and metaphysically, you’re talking about the interior world and the exterior world. The world of things and tangibles and the world of … that exists inside people’s minds, right?

Sylvia Wynter [1981]: And also, we see whiteness as a fact. That is the skin is white. But we do … for example, we do not see blue eyes as a metaphysical fact.

Wayne Pond [1981]: But it’s also a psychological fact …

Sylvia Wynter: Yes. [we pause the interview recording] That’s the genius of The Bluest Eye. You know what I mean? It is a metaphor. I’d also say that Invisible Man is a metaphor in the same way. They seem to capture something, you know? One single thing. And then everything emanates from it. And you have no awkwardness in joints or anything. Everything just follows.

Sylvia Wynter: And you could imagine The Bluest Eye as a blues song.

Jarvis Givens: Can you say more about that?

Sylvia Wynter: Keep the blues in the back of your mind, and notice that it is always about black creation. And in a way could only have been created from bad experiences.

***

Jarvis Givens: I just wanted to ask about “Uncle Tom Revisited,” and if you could say more about that project?

Sylvia Wynter: I hadn’t been in the United States very long. I’d gone to the University of California, San Diego, and I was there for about three years and then I came up to Stanford. And I began to see similarities. The dean of Stanford at the time was a scientist and I went in to see him and I was taken aback. And then he recommended me to Abraham Goldstein, whose work marked the beginning of my attempt to link my interest in the forms of knowledge we’ve already discussed with neurochemistry. And so I would begin from that moment.

Sylvia Wynter: I have no problem with consciousness, because clearly the biology of being and the origin story is what consciousness comes out of. And that’s why I called for a science of our origin stories. From the very beginning until today. And those origin stories begin in Africa. But then, what is the interaction of the biological processes with this story?

***

Sylvia Wynter: When I came here—and I mean this from heaven to earth—I could not believe how blacks survived this thing.

Sylvia Wynter: You see what I’m trying to say? Blacks all over the world who never thought of themselves as black, but now they do. So I’m just trying to say the 60’s were a really powerful time.

Joshua Bennett: And I just have one more question. For you, are you thinking that it’s a similar neurological process? That is, when you talk about the conversion experience in a religious sense versus what needs to happen with our inner eyes?

Sylvia Wynter: I think that’s something I’m trying to work on. The idea of natural scarcity and a natural system of development. And so you need the poor, you actually need to produce the poor because it’s the poor who prove, essentially prove, that there is natural scarcity everywhere. Not just you have natural scarcity in the desert. That’s what I’m thinking. But why do you take it to the most fertile regions of the earth?

Jarvis Givens: Right, like Brazil.

Sylvia Wynter: And so that has to be an origin story.

Jarvis Givens: This is making me think about the comment you made earlier about police shootings. I think that public display of the sheer gratuity of the number of bullets is actually about the origin story of the black as chaos.

Sylvia Wynter: The black as what?

Jarvis Givens: As chaos.

Sylvia Wynter: As chaos.

Joshua Bennett: Right, this monstrous figure. And so the public display of that violence is meant to uphold that origin story. The idea that you needed 41 bullets. You needed 20 bullets in order to subdue this creature.

Sylvia Wynter: You can never really overdo it because what you’re killing is a symbol, it’s not just living flesh and blood. It’s a symbol of how you would lose your job, or how you would lose your-

Joshua Bennett: Yes. Your family, your wife.

Sylvia Wynter: And also the powerful thing is that you would lose the privilege of whiteness. Because Trump’s thing is based on that. The people are following him for it. For whites in America they have been able to live on that, on that assurance that whatever happens to them they weren’t the blacks.

Sylvia Wynter: There was a whole institution of a human as a being held together by its origin narrative, right? On keeping its group intact and therefore relying on its group to fight against another. That was the first version. What I’m saying is we’re in a war now. One where we are destroying the planet precisely with this whole mythology of natural scarcity.

Sylvia Wynter: That is really what is destroyed. Know that we are actively destroying the planet. Then for the first time we are pushing toward having to come up with an origin story which envisions a different ending for all of us. How then, can we begin to conceive of ourselves as a species? It’s very difficult.

Sylvia Wynter: Well, here’s to you and here’s to your project.

Jarvis Givens: Thank you so much.

Joshua Bennett: Thank you.

Jarvis Givens: Here’s to you.

Joshua Bennett: Here’s to you and your fantastic work.

Jarvis Givens: And forcing us to think critically about the species and origin stories.

Sylvia Wynter: And origin stories.