The Matrix: Turning Darwin on His Head and Reimagining “Race”

by Matthew Hamburg

As an undergraduate at Stanford University, I had the chance to study from a breakthrough professor named Sylvia Wynter. Her central thesis is that human consciousness is not biologically programmed but rather programmed by narrative, or story. Our society and all of its educational disciplines are based on the idea that essentially biology determines consciousness — i.e. the story of Evolution. Wynter challenges that definition of the human as a purely biological being by putting forward the idea that we…