Is the Solar System Racist?

I ran across this article in the Boston Globe (Brad is from that area, so it’s sort of like his #2 hometown newspaper, after the Union-Leader) and thought, “wow, really? That’s really taking the national screamfest to bizarre places.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/08/01/the-solar-eclipse-coming-trump-country/Ldd7MhDroW1cdYCwCBoxbO/story.html

But then, I got curious and decided to google some similar articles. Surprise, surprise, surprise! I found some. I chose to stick with mainstream publications rather than the blogs and internet rags. I found others that hinted, but the Atlantic came right out and said it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/american-totality-eclipse-race/537318/

Leftists are really good at sucking the fun out of everything. That’s why I stopped watching late night television talk shows decades ago. Johnny Carson was great. He was an equal opportunity kidder. The current crop … their political bias shows from Jupiter. I can guess the punch line during the setup. Thanks, but no thanks.

At first glance, the headline, “American Blackout” appears to be an attempt to one-up the Boston Globe, who claimed that the sun is biased toward Trump supporters because the swath of the country that will witness 100% coverage is mostly made up of counties that voted for Trump in the 2016 election.

The writer, Alice Ristroph of Brooklyn Law School (no surprise there), suggests that the solar system has it out for minorities.

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people. Presumably, this is not explained by the implicit bias of the solar system.

Maybe the solar system is guilty of “inanimate object privilege.”

Or could it be that a majority of black people prefer to live where there are a lot of government services and so choose to live in cities which so happen not to be along the eclipse path? No! It couldn’t be that voluntary. It must be more nefarious than that.

Ristroph goes on:

Oregon, where this begins, is almost entirely white. The 10 percent or so of state residents who do not identify as white are predominantly Latino, American Indian, Alaskan, or Asian. There are very few black Oregonians.

From Oregon, the Great American Eclipse will travel through Idaho and Wyoming. (It will catch a tiny unpopulated piece of Montana, too.) Percentage-wise, Idaho and Wyoming are even whiter than Oregon. And as in Oregon, but even more so, the few non-white residents of Idaho and Wyoming are not black — they are mostly Latino, American Indian, and Alaskan.

Ristroph presumably attempts showcase the systemic racism that endures in America’s heartland. Newsflash for Ristroph! Oregon is one of the more progressive states and really isn’t part of the heartland. I don’t know why a lot of blacks don’t live there. Maybe they prefer places that see the sun occasionally. I know that’s why this American Indian wouldn’t live there … that and Oregon is a very progressive state and my conservative friends who live there complain a lot about how they feel unrepresented by their state government … when they’re not complaining about the rain.

Then Ristroph weaves her way along the sun-and-moon’s path through the Midwest and the Deep South, complaining copiously about each successive state the poor celestial bodies are forced to tumble over. They’re all racist, you see, and somehow the sun and the moon know that and approve of it.

After Wyoming, the eclipse will go through Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri …

The total eclipse will be visible from Lincoln, Nebraska, the state’s capital, which reports a black population of 3.8 percent. The city of Omaha has a greater black population, about 14 percent. [the national average]. It is home to many of the refugees from Africa and elsewhere that Nebraska has welcomed in recent years, many of whom now work in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. But Omaha is about 50 miles northeast of the path of totality.

Ultimately, Ristroph bemoans that even where the eclipse could access larger African-American populations, it appears to deliberately skirt them, such as in Mississippi, where the sun takes what can only be described as a clearly deliberate turn over Trump supporter-rich rural country rather than saving its show for major cities along the Gulf Coast where the populations are more diverse.

Ristroph’s ultimate conclusion is that America just plain sucks.

We tend to backlight our history, and so run the risk of trying to recover a glory that never existed. When the light in August changes, watch carefully.

That sounds vaguely threatening (given the plans for a November series of planned protest/riots that the Revolutionary Communist Party of America, Black Lives Matters, and Antifa have planned). We probably could have easily guessed her ending thesis without reading nearly 2000 words of lecturing that reminds us that leftists can discover “institutional racism” in a totally objective scientific phenomenon which just happens to be crossing the mid-section of the United States on this date. Somehow, everything in the United States can be related to racism.

So, here in Fairbanks, Alaska, we only get about a 30% coverage. Alaska is among the most diverse states, mostly with Asians and Native Americans. And the entire state is pretty much under cloud cover today. Maybe that’s a racist plot too.

Or it could just be weather and the tilt of the earth that are denying us a view.

#racism, #solareclipse, #commonsense