Total Eclipse of the Sun

The eclipse was a bust here in Minnesota. We were supposed to get around a 70% eclipse, but it was cloudy and the Sun never came out, all day. So, a moot point. One of my daughters lives in Texas and reports that the eclipse turned out to be rather cool there. But what can you really say, on a politics-oriented web site, about a purely scientific phenomenon?

You can point out that someone found a way to make even a solar eclipse about…what else?…race. And it comes from Texas:


As to why any scientific fields have been “mainly out of reach for Black folks,” I can only point out that 1) single-parent households are not, on average, conducive to academic achievement; 2) a culture in which kids who get good grades in school are disdained for “acting white” is fatal to academic achievement; and 3) black students who are encouraged to major in Black Studies and similar fields don’t become astronomers. Those factors are evidently more than 50 years of affirmative action have been able to overcome.

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