Most Americans probably welcomed yesterday’s solar eclipse as a brief distraction and respite from the bad news that seems to envelop us every day—most recently Charlottesville, Confederate monuments, and Trump’s response to these divisive subjects. “Not so fast,” says The Atlantic magazine. It recently published under the category of “science” an article by a Brooklyn College law professor captioned “American Blackout: A tour of the solar eclipse’s path reveals a nation that fought to maintain a different sort of totality.” The article asserts that “almost no black people” live along the path of the eclipse across the United States. The author’s nearly 5,000-word tome goes on to detail how at each point in its route from the west to the east coast the absence of black residents results from our Nation’s history of pervasive racism.[1] (The author also manages to work in several other themes apparently, in her view, somehow related to the eclipse such as the undemocratic nature of the electoral college process for electing presidents.)
While grudgingly conceding that the eclipse itself is not racist, the author suggests that its mostly white pathway constitutes some kind of an omen:
“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. Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.”
It’s not clear what to make of this article. Even the liberal website Vox found the point of the article “hard-to-parse.” Perhaps it is an attempt to outdo the Onion or maybe it is a bizarre attempt at allegory. In any event, it demonstrates that no subject is beyond politicization today and that the most strident voices among us will see the dark side (pun intended) of everything.
[1] Actually, the body of the article contradicts the author’s exaggerated assertion that “almost no black people” live along the eclipse’s path. At best, she has exercised considerable poetic license.