Law School Professor Pens Essay Explaining How Eclipse Is “Racist”

Are you looking forward to Monday’s solar eclipse — the first full eclipse to hit the United States in decades? You filthy, filthy racist.

That’s at least the take of Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph, who used a staggering 4,544 words in The Atlantic to explaining why the phenomenon of the moon blocking the sun just wasn’t diverse enough for her tastes.

“On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon,” Ristroph writes. “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.”

Yeah, really.

The movements of the firmament are indeed unconcerned with white privilege, although one would imagine Ristroph would be aware of this. To be fair, Ristroph does note that, “(p)resumably, this is not explained by the implicit bias of the solar system. It is a matter of population density, and more specifically geographic variations in population density by race, for which the sun and the moon cannot be held responsible.

“Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message,” Ristroph said.

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Among some of the problematic exclusions the eclipse will alight upon: Oregon, a blue state which had “a provision in the original state constitution of 1857 that prohibited any ‘free Negro or Mulatto’ from entering and residing in the state”; Wyoming and Idaho, which don’t have many minorities and most of those are “Latino, American Indian, and Alaskan”; rural Illinois, where the KKK used to be very active; Leavenworth, Kansas, where “the percentage of blacks among all federal prisoners is close to 40 percent” (all innocent, of course); Missouri, home of the Missouri Compromise, and the Deep South, which… well, do you really need to ask?

P/C PIXABAY