Mankind may not be evolving biologically, but we should be evolving spiritually, culturally and socially, humorist Bertice Berry told a Student Center Ballroom crowd as part of TCU’s Black History Month in February.

“If we were evolving biologically,” she said, “every mother would have an arm in the back of her neck so she could get at her kids in the car without reaching around.” Spicing her serious message of personal evolution with you-had-to-be-there humor, the sociologist and award-winning lecturer shared the world, “…according to me.”

“You are a byproduct of everything and everyone you ever come in contact with,” she said. “The more you come in contact with, the more you become. The more you limit the kind of interaction you have, the more you limit your own evolution.” Berry also said that diversity is about more than the color of one’s skin or where one lives.

“Integration means to ask, ‘What are you thinking, tell me about it, let’s grow,’ ” she said with preacher-like enthusiasm. “Because if you’re talking about critical thinking, which is what you’re supposed to learn at a university, you can’t do it with one thought.”

Especially when that one thought is about how you look, she said as she dropped into street talk to poke fun at certain college women.

“You say, ‘I gotta look good, I gotta test to fail,’ ” she said before seriously adding, “We choose ‘different’ from the outside, we don’t look at how they think or what their soul or purpose is. We live in the most religiously diverse society, but we won’t even experience another denomination, let alone another faith. But if greater is the God that is within you than the one who is in the world, what are you afraid of?” Turn off the soap operas, she told the students, turn off the talk shows.

“They are designed to divide, they are designed to present everyone in this room in a negative light,” she said, to spontaneous applause. “Your ancestors did not fight for the right for you to be here to sit up and watch Jerry Springer.”