For Millennials. By Millennials.
If you grew up learning science from Bill Nye’s “The Science Guy,” then you did science right. But you might feel old when you find Bill Nye has found his way to TikTok. After all, he does have to find ways to reach out to a new generation of children with his science lessons. It’s the perfect way to teach them in quarantine. However, he recently uploaded a TikTok video addressing how absurd racism is. And he did so by explaining the science behind the color of our skin.
Related: Keemstar receives massive backlash for “lecturing” Hasan Piker on racism.
Bill Nye ends racism with science!
Bill Nye’s video started off by explaining the distribution of ultraviolet light across the planet:
This is a map of the continents of the Earth, showing how much ultraviolet light lands in each latitude. It turns out the closer you are to the equator, the more intense the ultraviolet.
Afterward, Bill Nye explained how the ultraviolet map of the Earth coincides with the map of the color of our skin. And there was a correlation. Furthermore, he also mentioned how humans descended and spread from Africa, indicating how wrong racism is:
Now, here’s the same map of the same continents, but with one color. And it turns out that everybody, on Earth, has descended from people that lived here in Africa. And then as groups of us moved around the world, the color of our skin had to change, and here’s why.
Vitamin D proves racism is just wrong
Finally, Bill Nye explained how ultraviolet light makes vitamin D in our skin. and as we moved further away from the equator, as well as ultraviolet light, it changed the color of our skin too:
Our skin is where we make vitamin D. If you don’t get enough ultraviolet, you don’t get enough vitamin D. But if you get too much ultraviolet, then you break down your folates. You have to have it in perfect balance, and because the ultraviolet varies, the color of our skin varies. And that’s it, everybody. That’s the reason we have different colored skin, but we’re all one species. But we’re not treating each other fairly. Not everybody is getting an even shake. So it’s time to change things.
And this is how Bill Nye proved how absurd and baseless racism is when all of us are the same species. This is how you can use your expertise to call out racism. We should all try to not only be against racism but should be anti-racist and not tolerate this aspect in our society the best way we can. We should all take notes from Bill Nye and play our part in ending racism. Here’s the TikTok video: