From black holes to black history

Q: Do you have a hypothesis for the reasons behind the improvement of race relations?

A: I think it’s that the more you expose those people in power to talented members who are not part of that community who holds the power — it could be women, it could be blacks, it could be whomever and whatever — if they’re exposed to them, then it makes it harder to hold a stereotype.

So if you see me explaining whether a blob of plasma from the sun is going to influence life on Earth, and you’re soliciting my comments on this, and then you see a homeless person on the street who is black, you have to confront that.  Perhaps for the first time, you’re going to have to ask yourself, what opportunities has this nation foregone by not providing access to opportunity for everyone?

It’s not that everybody is equal. That’s why we take exams. Some people do better than others, and some people get lax, and other surpass them. Not everyone is equal in everything. That’s not the point here. The point is, what is your access to opportunity? In a free, democratic society, you don’t want to be disenfranchised simply because of the color of your skin. As I see the kids hanging out on the street corner without jobs, without opportunity, without someone to see that they could be somebody — all I can think is, “What new scientific frontier will go unexplored because there are kids in the street who, but for the lack of opportunity, would have been the next Nobel laureate?”

That’s a real travesty in a nation that is wealthy. It becomes a squandering of a nation’s resources — in this case, the resource is the human capital represented in the next generation.

I was sensitized to this by the profile of my father, who was active in the civil rights program in the 1960s, under New York Mayor John Lindsay. He was the commissioner of the Department of Human Resources, and another department called the Manpower and Career Development Agency. These are branches of city government that were created to empower those who were not in a previous generation empowered.

The unwritten story is that amid all the challenges of the 1960s, and the riots that took place in the urban ghettos, New York City did not have a riot at any time during that turbulent era. That’s a story that’s unwritten because you only wrote about it when bad things happened. So there’s no one to talk about what steps were taken in the city at the time to defuse what otherwise might have been a powderkeg of frustrations.

The community has to believe, not only because they were told but because the opportunities are real, that they are true participants in the politics of their times. You have to feel represented. You have to feel like someone cares for you. So I grew up with that exposure, and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s kept me grounded in a certain kind of reality — without which I might have just simply floated away into the universe, without any knowledge or care or understanding of the human condition.

Q: When you get down to it, that’s the most amazing cosmic quandary of them all — dealing with the human factor.

A: People sometimes say, “Physics is hard ... I’ll go major in psychology.” No. Humans are much harder. If you look at the size of the physics book that contains all that we know about gravity, it’s one book. It’s a few hundred pages. Then you look at books that try to understand people … I don’t think we’re even close. The book has not even been written yet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses his personal story in more depth in his autobiography, “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist.”

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