This paper argues that the out of Africa hypothesis is an expression of Euro-American cultural beliefs that are, paradoxically, anti-social. These commitments can be traced back to the influence of Christian scholasticism on early modern naturalist thinking, where reverence for order and God's impersonal design took precedent over our obligation toward the lives of created things.
Revisiting Darwin’s defense of monogenism, the UNESCO Statements on Race, and the emergence of the Out of Africa hypothesis in population genetics I show how these scientific claims are not oriented toward the social other or inculcating an ethical obligation to living things. Instead, “We are all African” celebrates the ability of science to render the human a natural object anchored to a stable (which is to say "asocial") biological order.
“Black Lives Matter” and “We are all African” are therefore not commensurable truth claims. The latter is a type of knowing believed to occupy space outside the influence of religion, belief, historical precedent, and political commitments. The former is shaped by political, social obligations secondary to the more important task of locating black life within the larger biological system that governs the species homo.
