UPDATE: There are now over 500 comments on Ristroph’s piece, virtually all of them critical, and some quite funny. I actually feel sorry for the poor woman, but maybe she doesn’t read comments. Here are a few I selected quickly.

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The present ideological climate in America is such that almost anything can serve as a reason to hammer on America’s racist past and the racism that our country still harbors. That’s fine when we’re discussing Confederate statues or white supremacy, but today’s eclipse? Granted, at least Atlantic author Alice Ristroph, a white professor at Brooklyn Law School, didn’t say that the laws of physics were racist, moving the shadow of today’s eclipse over mostly white areas of the U.S., but she uses that fact to emphasize the whiteness of the areas traversed by the shadow, and to rehash things that we already know. Her lesson (see below) is that the eclipse itself gives poignant reminders of America’s racism.

Click on the screenshot to see the article:

The piece is so contrived, so ridiculous, that at first I thought it was a joke.  But it wasn’t. As a writer friend of mind noted:

I am just as shocked, dismayed, and wearied by the idiocy of this piece as you.  It seems like some sort of sick, virtue-signaling satire, but it’s not.  The author is a law professor!  She’s supposed to teach her students how to think straight!

First, here the New York Times‘s map of the full and 75% totality shadow. As you see, the shadow passes over much of the South.

Now I don’t want to enact the emotional labor to provide a full dissection of this piece, but it pretty much dissects itself when quoted. Yes, I think racism is evil, but I’m weary of people using things like eclipses to point out once again how evil we white people are and how complicit in racial injustice. A straight article about the topic with a genuine hook would have been better, but Ristroph more or less has to force the astronomical facts to fit her ideology. I’ll give some quotes (indented) to show how the article indicts itself:

It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.

Presumably [JAC: ??], 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. At a moment of deep disagreement about the nation’s best path forward, here comes a giant round shadow, drawing a line either to cut the country in two or to unite it as one.

At this point my kishkes began tying themselves in knots. But wait! There’s more! Here’s where she comes very close to blaming the eclipse for giving white people the best view of totality:

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 land that is now Oregon was not, of course, always inhabited by white people, but as a U.S. territory and then a state, Oregon sought to get and stay white. Among several formal efforts at racial exclusion was a provision in the original state constitution of 1857 that prohibited any “free Negro or Mulatto” from entering and residing in the state.

But wait! There’s still more:

From Oregon, the Great American Eclipse will travel through Idaho and Wyoming. (It will catch a tiny unpopulated piece of Montana, too.) 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.

She shoehorns in a lot of stuff taken from history books, but, sadly, the tedious piece goes on as the eclipse moves East:

After Wyoming, the eclipse will go through Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. This is America’s heartland, and also, literally, the land of compromise. When Missouri sought statehood in 1819, the United States consisted of 22 states, equally divided between those that permitted slavery and those that did not. Missouri’s request to enter as a slave-holding state threatened to upset the balance, but a kind of unity was preserved with the Missouri Compromise. The deal allowed Missouri its slaves but drew a line across the nation, east-west to the Pacific Ocean, and mandated that slavery would be illegal in all other territories north of the line. Nebraska and Kansas, bordering Missouri to the west and lying just north of the compromise line, were thus to remain slavery-free. But the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed the (white) people of those territories to decide for themselves whether to have slavery.

Had enough? But wait—there’s still more! With all that you get this free juicer disquisition on how the path of totality unfairly goes through white areas:

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.

More?

From Kansas, the eclipse goes to Missouri, still mostly bypassing black people, though now much more improbably. About a third of Kansas City, Missouri, is black, but most of the city lies just south of the path of totality. To get the full show, eclipse chasers should go north to St. Joseph, almost 90 percent white and about 6 percent black, the place where Jesse James died and where Marshall Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem, was born.

. . . Moving east, the eclipse will pass part of St. Louis, whose overall population is nearly half black. But the black residents are concentrated in the northern half of the metropolitan area, and the total eclipse crosses only the southern half. Eight miles north of the path of totality is Ferguson, where Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown three summers ago.

When the eclipse finally hits the South, Ristroph sees its path as highlighting racism all the more:

Former slave-holding states are still the home to most of America’s black population. In Kentucky, Tennessee, and eventually South Carolina, the eclipse will finally pass over black Americans. Even here, though, the path of totality seems to mark the legacy of slavery and the persistence of segregation more than any form of inclusion.

The problem here is Ristroph’s confirmation bias: there is no place in America where the path of total could pass where she couldn’t draw a lesson about racism. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of her article? It’s just a poorly conceived conceit for her to flaunt her virtue by indicting the rest of us.  And so, mercifully close to the piece’s end, we get this:

But after Tennessee, the shadow regains some speed and travels over white people only again for a while. It catches the northeast corner of Georgia and the western tip of North Carolina. Though both these states have substantial black populations, both also include overwhelmingly white rural areas, and it is those areas that lie in the path of totality. Rabun County, 1 percent black at the 2010 census, is the best place in Georgia to see the eclipse. Also in the path of totality are Habersham (3.4 percent black), Union (0.5 percent), and White (1.7 percent) counties.

. . . After Georgia, the eclipse will pass over a small piece of western North Carolina. The black population of these barely populated counties hovers around 1 percent, falling as low as 0.2 percent in Graham. The path of totality will narrowly miss Tryon, the birthplace of Nina Simone. In 1963, after learning of a bombing of a black church that killed four girls, Simone shut herself in a room and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in less than an hour.

Had enough? I’ll spare you all but the end of the piece.

There are two possible conclusions: either God (or physical law) is racist, or that Ristroph is straining hernia-hard to use her metaphor. The latter is clearly the case, but in Ristroph’s last paragraph she lapses into full-on purple prose, working herself into a lather of righteousness and perhaps angling for a New Yorker article—but the New Yorker has far better writing than this:

And then the shadow goes to sea, still indifferent to the Earth below, indifferent to the little creatures here, indifferent to these people indifferent to their own histories. Or perhaps we are not indifferent, but just no more capable than butterflies and bees of seeing the long path and of deciding to change it. 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. [She’s referring to the census.] We have not yet found a political system in which every person counts equally.

I’m sure Dr. Ristroph’s feelings are sincere and admirable, but she has to find a better way to work against bigotry than use the eclipse as a metaphor. It’s labored to the point of being amusing which sort of undercuts her purpose. And I’m mystified that a respectable publication like the Atlantic would publish something like this. I guess it shows that in modern journalism, there’s no vehicle too bizarre to convey your anger about injustice.