The Eclipse Is Racist Because It Fails To Affect Enough Black People, The Atlantic Suggests.
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 Atlantic’s very lengthy essay on the failure of the eclipse to occur where a sufficient number of black people reside is entitled “American Blackout.” It clocks in at a remarkable 4,544 words and does not appear to be satire.
Concerning “the Great American Eclipse,”
Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph writes in the rapidly deteriorating magazine, “there live almost no black people” “along most of its path.”
The Atlantic’s longwinded law professor assures readers that “implicit bias of the solar system” is “presumably” not the cause of eclipse’s failure to affect enough black people.
“Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.”
Oregon, where the eclipse will first appear in the continental United States, “is almost entirely white.” “There are very few black Oregonians, and this is not an accident.” It’s totally on purpose in 2017, The Atlantic claims, because the Pacific Northwest state had a “racial exclusion” clause in its original 1857 constitution.
The Atlantic notes that the eclipse will then move toward Wyoming and Idaho, which also have very low populations of black people. After an extensive discourse criticizing the U.S. Census, The Atlantic tells readers that the eclipse will travel through Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. In this section of its essay, The Atlantic manages to drop the names of Bruce Springsteen, Jesse James, Eminem, Chelsea Manning, Michael Brown and Howard Zinn (a shallow socialist writer panned even by most serious socialists).
“There are too many damn facts,” The Atlantic also complains.
After considerable whining about the Electoral College and the way Congress is organized, The Atlantic moves on to southern Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee. There’s substantial discussion of the Ku Klux Klan in this section — and, of course, slavery.
Here, The Atlantic criticizes Abraham Lincoln for being too cautious with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Next, The Atlantic traces the path of the eclipse to “overwhelmingly white rural areas” in the Deep South. There’s much discussion of the Civil War and much talk about “the glib view” America’s commoners have concerning Civil War history. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in the name of white supremacy, rates a mention.
In its final paragraph, The Atlantic concludes that the United States is “still segregated” and has “debts that no honest man can pay.” Cryptically, the magazine suggests, “the strange path of the eclipse suggests a need for reorganization” of the entire American political system.
The Atlantic classifies its article about the path of the eclipse in the category of “science” even though nothing remotely approaching science appears in any of the 4,544 words.