Guest post by David Middleton
American Blackout
A tour of the solar eclipse’s path reveals a nation that fought to maintain a different sort of totality.
ALICE RISTROPH AUG 18, 2017 SCIENCE
Totality is everything, say those who chase solar eclipses. When the moon fully obscures the sun and casts its shadow on Earth, the result is like nothing you’ve seen before—not even a partial eclipse. A merely partial eclipse does not flip day to night, because the sun is bright enough to light our fields of vision with only a tiny fraction of its power. But when the sun and moon align just so, a little piece of Earth goes dark in the middle of the day. In this path of totality, night comes suddenly and one can see the shape of the moon as a circle darker than black, marked by the faint backlight of the sun’s corona. Astronomers and eclipse chasers chart carefully to be sure that they can watch from exactly the right place at the right time. They know that you cannot compromise with the sun. For a dark sky, the sun must be banished altogether.
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. The moon’s shadow will be about 70 miles wide, and it will race across the country faster than the speed of sound, exiting the eastern seaboard shortly before 3 p.m. local time. 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.
[…]
Alice Ristroph is a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
Presumably? If not for the other 4,585 words in this “science” article (according to The Atlantic), I would say, “Surely she was not serious, when she felt she had to qualify “this is not explained by the implicit bias of the solar system” with the word, “presumably.”
Unsurprisingly, Vox published an apologia for this nonsense and accused conservatives of unfairly piling on.
“The eclipse is racist”: how one bad article sparked a conservative pile-on
Updated by Aug 21, 2017
A case of a solar eclipse metaphor gone terribly, terribly wrong has become a conservative talking point about the left and racism.
Last week, the Atlantic reprinted a Democracy: A Journal of Ideas article, which attempted to make a hard-to-parse point about race in America in the context of the solar eclipse. The thesis of the article was that the regions experiencing the total eclipse are mostly inhabited by white people — and also America has a history of racism.
It was quickly picked up by far-right pundits and conservative media as the left’s attempt to make everything about racism…
[…]
The article comes on the heels of a terror attack at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia…
[…]
Good fracking grief! WTF does any of this have to do with the eclipse? At least they didn’t try to blame the path of the eclipse on President Trump… yet.
Forrest Gardener
Spot on.
“In 1890, the census kept the terms black and mulatto but also added quadroon and octoroon. We needed such precision in the post-war era of Jim Crow, when even one drop of African blood rendered a person legally black. With whiteness, there was no compromise. Totality was everything.”
Far right in Australia is being against constitutional recognition of the Aboriginal people and laws that preference those people for public service jobs and greater social security. This is because it benefits those who are mostly of European blood. Some “elders” look they could have immigrated from Ireland yesterday while some Aboriginal communities are dysfunctional beyond belief even though $50 000 pa per person is spent on these communities ( on top of existing public services). You’re racist for pointing out that a little black blood shouldn’t make you different to the rest of us.
In Australia, it is not only ‘far right’ people who are against constitutional recognition for Aboriginal people, it is the overwhelming majority of the population. Our Constitution is colour blind, it makes no mention of whites, blacks, Chinese, Europeans, Aborigines or anyone else. It does have a provision enabling Parliament to make laws regarding people of any race – this was unfortunately added in 1967 – a bad move! There are provisions in various laws that prefer Aborigines for public service jobs, and greater grants than are applicable to the no-aboriginal community. Those of “European blood” are discriminated against.
And the overwhelming majority of the country is against instituting ‘apartheid’ here.
Just to set the record straight.
“The eclipse is racist”…obviously thousands of Black people should have been bussed in especially to join in the occasion and ensure diversity.
Forest, Bingo!
The scientific consensus is the universe is mooning Donald Trump. It’s been peer[ing into the sun]-reviewed, so don’t deny it, you science-denying denier.
This Alice Ristroph ranks right up there with people who wanted to reschedule the eclipse because they were going on vacation or [whatever] and wouldn’t have time to view it today.
I got a nice shot of the moon and sun peeking through the clouds, about half-and-half, sort of a nice yin-yang/the Universe is One kind of image.
Alice has reached “Peak Stupidity.”
Racism is the new big put down buzzword from the left. The irony is overwhelming. The new designer-brained Democrats are angrily, self righteously tearing down Civil War hero statues, that were erected by… wait for it… Democrats!!! And the ккк were created and peopled by Democrats for generations. This doesn’t get reported by dumbed down MSM lefty reporters. Post normal society can shift history to fit world view.
In the Edmonton area in Alberta, there was next to nothing.
I had a PROUD momma moment today, I just had to share. As some of my neighbors gathered in my front yard today ( they saw us sitting out with our nifty unsafe glasses) we were pointing out things to an awestruck group of teens…like that their shadows on the ground were no longer sharp and focused but had a strange “blur” around them. As they noticed the temperature start to drop long before the max eclipse ( we got 90% totality) one of them snarked :
” Hey! Isn’t all that CO2 in our atmosphere supposed to be “trapping” (he air quoted) the heat? Why is it getting cooler then?”
My 14 year old daughter said “Maybe Antifa sucked them all out of the atmosphere because CO2 molecules only LIKE certain types of radiation. Racist particles!”
My husband and I burst out laughing right along with everyone else gathered. There IS hope !!
The US Census Bureau provided a number of cities along the route.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/solar-eclipse.htm
Based on the latest demographics from Wikipedia (usually 2010 census):
Madras, OR 6,046 0.70%
Idaho Falls, ID 56,813 0.70%
Casper, WY 55,316 0.80%
Lincoln, NE 258,379 3.80%
Jefferson City, MO 43,079 16.90%
Carbondale, IL 25,597 23.14%
Paducah, KY 25,024 23.67%
Nashville, TN 626,681 27.70%
Clayton, Ga 2,047 1.40%
Columbia, SC 129,272 42.20%
Overall, the population of those cities is 21% African American. The US population of African Americans is 12%. Based on this seemingly unbiased sample provided by the US Census Bureau, African Americans were heavily over-represented as residents along the path of totality.
So… The Great American Eclipse was unfairly depriving African Americans of sunlight… /Snark
For a dark sky, the sun must be banished altogether.
Could it be a Dark Star??
http://youtu.be/IkjiDJUHPHM
Was the film really as bad as the trailer seems to indicate?
Dark Star is the prototypical great bad science fiction movie. It blazed the trail for Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, An Inconvenient Truth and its inconvenient sequel.
Hmmm…well I guess if you’re a rich and famous actress then race isn’t an issue. I have video footage I captured this morning of Halle Berry’s two chartered helicopters carrying herself and her entourage land atop the mountain just 200 yards from me. Racism, bah!
Everything is racist because the purveyors of this drivel have no understanding of the term “confirmation bias”.
And no concept of truth either.
Copy – paste – saved!
Going on the classroom wall.
+100000
Excuse me…. But did she just accuse the Eclipse as being Racist?
…. or did the fact that America is mostly a “White” anglicized nation just dawn upon the good Professor?…. I wonder if she knows that English is America’s official language too?
It seems she doesn’t know a hell of a lot about America at all….. or eclipses for that matter.
She is racist, period. And divisive. Morgan Freeman makes some good points she might want to consider.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/blackhistory.asp
All I can say, scientifically speaking, is that this takes mooning to a whole new level….
It seems there are a lot of people here who have not recognized that Alice Ristroph was being tongue in cheek. If she had added /sarc/ at the end they may have understood her.
Please, Alice, do not write any Fool’s Day stories – too many people will believe you!
Under normal circumstances, this sentence wouldn’t require a /Sarc tag:
However, the circumstances are not normal. Donald Trump is in the White House and academic pinheads are in the grips of apoplectic seizures.
Why would the Atlantic have published a 4,500 word piece of sarcasm that was impossible to recognize as such, and could have been condensed to a couple hundred words?
So the Atlantic was fooled into publishing an article mocking the idea of racism against blacks on the heels of Charlottesville and any number of controversial white supremacy events?
According to Vox, whenever a liberal does something stupid, it’s the fault of conservatives for noticing.
I addressed it: earthground.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/yes-virginia-there-is-one-race/
“A person rammed a car into other persons. Anyone who was protesting in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia during this fascist/anti-fascist showdown could have died for next to nothing in my opinion. Beyond staring into a solar eclipse, street protests are the leading cause of media-driven blindness?”
Tell Tara Golshan that if Ristroph wanted to write “a hard-to-parse point about race in America” then she should write about the average reading proficiency of the high school graduates from Public School Systems in our urban centers.
With and average graduate reading at 8th grade levels with 4th grade math skills one could surmise that the real racists are the collectivists who are breeding welfare dependent voters. Voters who are “dumbed down” sufficiently to be convince that a solar eclipse was a racist action.
Rather proves my point that American has too many professors.
The Atlantic decided to try to outdo their previous effort titled The Constellations Are Sexist. See https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/sexism-in-the-stars/496037/
I think her point is that black people prefer to live in close proximity and white people are happy they do, making white people racist.