It wasn’t that long ago when everyone ‘effing’ loved science.
And now everything — even an eclipse — is about racism and feelings?
Leave it to ‘The Atlantic‘ to find a way to write a racial screed about the eclipse.
While people in the past would have been talking about a once-in-a-lifetime event… in today’s political climate, everything has to have a political angle. And if it can be weaponized against the current administration, so much the better.
After a couple paragraphs of preamble, they jumped right into it:
It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.
That escalated quickly.
Yes, you guessed it. They are using the eclipse as a means to talk about racism.
Don’t worry, there is the necessary throwaway line about the moon and sun not being explicty racist in where they cast their shadow. It’s a commentary on who happens to live beneath it.
But then they add: “Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.”
Right. So they obviously gave in to that temptation. And wrote an entire article on it. How ‘journalist-y’ of them.
And considering they are almost entirely RED states, you can guess what’s coming.
A few excerpts:
And if it seems we need no reminding, consider this: We tend to backlight our history, and so run the risk of trying to recover a glory that never existed.
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, and this is not an accident.
The American West was not the land of chattel slavery—with some brief exceptions, slavery was illegal in Oregon before and after statehood. But among the dreams of the pioneers there was, at least sometimes, a dream of escaping racial strife by escaping black people altogether.
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.
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.
(Are we even still talking about eclipses, here? It feels like a bait-and-switch.)
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. 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.
(So even that doesn’t ‘count’.)
Oh, look. Levinworth, on the other hand, DOES count. It gets 30 seconds of darkness. It’s a prison town. With black population double that of the percentage of black residents statewide. There was also a gratuitous ‘Chelsea Manning’ reference. Because why the hell not, if you’re going political anyway, why not check ALL the intersectional boxes?
From Kansas, the eclipse goes to Missouri, still mostly bypassing black people, though now much more improbably.
And a Ferguson reference…
You knew this was coming…
But the equal power of states was enshrined at a time when states served white people, and never since have states’ rights been a particularly effective mechanism for racial equality. Looking back, the bargains struck to protect the states appear as resolutions to disputes among white people, including disputes about what to do with people who are not white. And looking ahead, we can expect the equal power of the states to exacerbate further the political inequality of individual persons: The farther you live from other people, the more electoral power you wield.
After that, there was the mention of an abolitionist, used not to give a more nuanced and balanced narrative (why do that?) but to show how the abolitionist’s own descendant (a Muslim convert, and a sports hero) rejected his ‘slave name’.
The Great American Eclipse illuminates, or darkens, a land still segregated, a land still in search of equality, a land of people still trying to dominate each other. When the lovely glow of a backlight fades, history is relentless, just one damn fact after another, one damning fact after another. America is a nation with debts that no honest man can pay. It is too much to ask that these debts simply be forgiven. But perhaps the strange path of the eclipse suggests a need for reorganization. We have figured out, more or less, how to count every person. We have not yet found a political system in which every person counts equally.
The author of the piece does the one thing the Left perpetually does. It keeps score of past wrongs. It encourages others to harbor them in their hearts and live with a chip on their shoulder.
Isn’t that exactly what racists in every nation around the world do? Or does the author really believe this is a uniquely AMERICAN problem? Or that it will be fixed by perpetuating grievances?
Barack Obama spoke at Robert Byrd’s funeral — the longest Serving (Democrat) Senator in Congress. He voted ‘No’ on the Civil Rights Act.
Either he can be forgiven — as Barack and other Democrats obviously did — and there is a path forward, or he cannot, and Hillary (who called him her mentor) and all other Democrats are tainted by even knowing him, much less serving with him.
Must we insist on looking backward and enumerating our grievances, which politicians exploit for personal gain?
Must we pay more only lip service to those great words…
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’
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