Law professor Alice Ristroph wrote in the Atlantic magazine that the 2017 solar eclipse, its path, or those who view it, are "racist."
Law professor Alice Ristroph wrote in the Atlantic magazine that the 2017 solar eclipse, its path, or those who view it, are "racist."
In August 2017, two right-wing web sites reportedÂ that a law professor had said the 2017 Solar Eclipse was â€œracist.â€ First, on 20 August, the Daily Caller published an article headlined â€œThe Eclipse is Racist Because it Fails to Affect Enough Black People, the Atlantic Suggests.â€ < The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, has determined that the total eclipse of the sun due to occur on Monday will fail to affect enough black people. > The following day, the Conservative TribuneÂ claimed: < Are you looking forward to Mondayâ€™s solar eclipse â€” the first full eclipse to hit the United States in decades? You filthy, filthy racist. Thatâ€™s at least the take ofÂ Brooklyn Law SchoolÂ professor Alice Ristroph, who used a staggering 4,544 words inÂ The AtlanticÂ to explaining why the phenomenon of the moon blocking the sun just wasnâ€™t diverse enough for her tastes. > Both web sites are referring to an essay by Alice Ristroph, who is indeed a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York. The essay, originally published inÂ DemocracyÂ with the title â€œBlackout,â€ and republished by the AtlanticÂ on 18 August, does not say say or even imply that the eclipse or the path of totality are racist. Nor does Ristroph say or implyÂ that the eclipse will not be visible to â€œenoughâ€ black people, or that those who choose to view the eclipse are racists.Â Instead, Ristroph has written a lyric essay that uses the path of totality as a literary mechanism to explore the United Statesâ€™ troubled racial history. The path of totality crosses a swath of the United States in which there live â€œalmost no black people.â€ Ristroph is clear that this is a coincidence, but she uses the fact as an opportunity to examine the historical reasons that some of those areas remain almost all white. Along the way, she discusses different visions of â€œtotality,â€ such as Oregonâ€™s original goal of being an all-white state, orÂ General William Tecumseh Shermanâ€™s vision of â€œtotal warâ€ during the U.S. Civil War.Â At no point does Ristroph use the word â€œracistâ€, and she explicitly makes the (blindingly obvious) point that the eclipse itself does not harbor any racial prejudice: < It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.Â Presumably, 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. > The Daily Caller and Conservative Tribuneâ€™s misguided interpretations of Ristrophâ€™s essay suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of it.Â
"eclipse" AND "racist"