Black History. Universal History.
There’s a moment of perspective that changes how you see yourself forever. If it hasn’t happened yet, I hope it does after you read this blog post.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. He also explained something even more grounding: the ingredients that make up life on Earth, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and trace elements, are the most common elements in the entire universe.
Which means this isn’t poetry or metaphor.
It’s physics.
We are all literally composed of stardust.
The same elements forged in the birth of stars live in your bones, your blood, your breath. We are not visitors to the universe. We are of the universe. The universe is alive within us, and we are alive within it.
That truth matters, especially during Black History Month.
(Keep reading, I promise to bring it together.)
The Lie of Smallness
So much of Black history has been distorted by one central lie: that Black people are somehow smaller, lesser, or peripheral to the human story.
History books minimized contributions. Systems reduced value to labor. Narratives framed survival as resistance instead of brilliance. And over time, those messages did something dangerous, they tried to convince people that they were accidents instead of inevitabilities. I said tried.
But physics doesn’t lie.
If the universe itself required billions of years of expansion, collapse, pressure, heat, and transformation to produce the elements that formed you, then your existence is not random. It is not marginal. It is not disposable.
It is precise.
Black Excellence Is Not an Exception, It’s Evidence
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s work doesn’t just expand our understanding of space. It quietly dismantles the idea that intellectual authority has a single look, origin, or voice.
Black excellence is often treated as an exception:
“The first.”
“One of the few.”
“Against all odds.”
But the universe tells a different story.
Creation itself thrives on diversity, variation, collision, and remixing. Stars die so others can form. Elements combine under pressure to create entirely new possibilities. Nothing in the cosmos exists in isolation, and nothing meaningful is created without tension.
Black history is not a sidebar to human history.
It is a record of adaptation, innovation, and endurance under cosmic-level pressure.
That’s not accidental.
That’s foundational.
You Carry the Universe and Its Authority
When you understand that you are made of the same materials as stars, something shifts.
You stop shrinking in rooms that benefit from your silence.
You stop apologizing for taking up space.
You stop internalizing systems that were never designed to tell the truth about your worth.
This isn’t motivational talk. It’s grounding.
If the universe is expansive, evolving, and resilient, and you are made from it, then those traits live in you too.
Your curiosity.
Your creativity.
Your insistence on justice.
Your refusal to disappear.
That’s not rebellion.
That’s alignment.
My brand, LabelMeLegal, exists because too many people have been taught to doubt themselves in systems that profit from confusion, intimidation, and silence.
Whether it’s the legal system, corporate spaces, financial structures, or education, people are often made to feel like they don’t belong, don’t know enough, or shouldn’t ask questions.
But clarity is power.
Knowledge is inheritance.
And understanding your place in the universe, literally and figuratively, changes how you move through every system designed to overwhelm you.
Black History Month isn’t just about honoring the past.
It’s about reclaiming scale.
You are not small.
You are not late.
You are not out of place.
You are made of the same ancient materials that built the universe itself.
And nothing with that kind of origin was meant to live quietly.
