Black Holes Are Connected To ‘Racial Blackness,’ Cornell U Course Says

An astronomy course at prestigious Cornell University, concerned about racism in the universe, not just Planet Earth, asked the deathless question: “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?”

As famed author Heather Mac Donald, who has written numerous books, including “The War on Cops,” writes in City Journal, the course, titled “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” notes in the catalog description that “conventional wisdom” asserts that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” but astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri suggest the truth may be otherwise.

The catalog description reads:

Conventional wisdom would have it that the “black” in black holes has nothing to do with race. Surely there can be no connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness. Can there? Contemporary Black Studies theorists, artists, fiction writers implicitly and explicitly posit just such a connection. Theorists use astronomy concepts like “black holes” and “event horizons” to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images. Co-taught by professors in Comparative Literature and Astronomy, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies. Texts may include works by theorists like Michelle Wright and Denise Ferreira da Silva, authors like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, music by Sun Ra, Outkast and Janelle Monáe. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

Mac Donald notes, “Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the ‘conventional wisdom’ by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes ‘Newton’s laws of motion and gravity’ and ‘theoretical particle physics’ to ‘subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.’ The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

Keep reading

Dem Sen. Whitehouse Defends Family’s Membership in All-White Club: ‘It’s a Long Tradition in RI’

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who portrays himself as a progressive social justice warrior, is facing new scrutiny over his family’s decades-long membership at an all-white country club.

Local media approached Whitehouse on Friday in Pawtucket to ask why the Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport hasn’t admitted any minorities yet.

“I think the people who are running the place are still working on that and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet,” Whitehouse said. 

“It’s a long tradition in Rhode Island and there are many of them and I think we just need to work our way through the issues, thank you,” he added as he was ushered away by a staffer.

Keep reading

Black Crowd Cheers as White Woman is Savagely Beaten at New Jersey Juneteenth Riot

A predominantly black crowd of Juneteenth revelers cheered as a white woman was savagely beaten in the streets of a Long Branch, New Jersey commercial district while the city marked the nation’s first Juneteenth federal holiday. Police from several jurisdictions later responded to the scene while retail employees remained trapped in their shops as the celebration commemorating the end of slavery devolved into a riot.

According to local media reports, the Juneteenth celebration, held in Long Branch’s Pier Village, devolved into a full-scale riot with hundreds of celebration attendees turning on their host city and smashing up businesses and property throughout the Pier Village area.

Local police advised residents to avoid the area, dispatching officers in riot gear to quell the unrest as retail employees, many of whom are under the age of 18, remained trapped in their places of employment as the crowd targeted storefronts for destruction. Additionally, police advised that “numerous fights” involving attacks on officers had broken out in the streets.

Keep reading

Top 10 Black Slaveowners

The US has a long and gruesome history of slavery that has affected almost every part of its culture. Children in school learn the harsh circumstances that slaves were forced to live with and the incredible cruelty white slave owners showed them. American history teachers know how important it is to teach the horrors of slavery—not only so the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated but because the long-term oppression and cruelty toward black people extends even to modern times in important cultural issues such as police brutality and a cycle of poverty that is directly linked to racism caused by slavery.

What isn’t often taught is that there were many black people who not only participated in the slave trade but who often profited greatly from it. They owned slaves as property in order to enhance their own economical well-being by having free labor for their plantations. Many were biracial children of former white masters and were either freed or were left some property in a will. The American South is infamous for using slaves on their large plantations, and many of the black slave owners on this list are from South Carolina and Louisiana. Some were considered slave magnates (for owning more than 50 slaves), but others earned their place simply for their unique stories.

Keep reading

NBC News Fails Miserably in Getting ‘It’s the Whites Beating Asians’ Narrative Going Again

Stop Asian hate’ tried to get resurrected by NBC News. After weeks of dying due to not fitting the narrative, there’s some brand-new study saying that most perpetrators of anti-Asian violence are white. The headline itself is a doozy and the data is even shoddier (via NBC News):

Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, released analysis last week that drew on previously published studies on anti-Asian bias. She found official crime statistics and other studies revealed more than three-quarters of offenders of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents, from both before and during the pandemic, have been white, contrary to many of the images circulating online.

Wong told NBC Asian America that such dangerous misconceptions about who perpetrates anti-Asian hate incidents can have “long-term consequences for racial solidarity.”

“The way that the media is covering and the way that people are understanding anti-Asian hate at this moment, in some ways, draws attention to these long-standing anti-Asian biases in U.S. society,” Wong said. “But the racist kind of tropes that come along with it — especially that it’s predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly — there’s not really an empirical basis in that.”

[…]

Other studies confirm the findings, Wong wrote. She pointed to separate research from the University of Michigan Virulent Hate Project, which examined media reports about anti-Asian incidents last year and found that upward of 75 percent of news stories identified perpetrators as male and white in instances of physical or verbal assault and harassment when the race of the perpetrator was confirmed. Wong said the numbers could even be an underestimate.

Wait, what?! First, this joke of a story says that we’re not really seeing black people physically assault Asians. There’s no “empirical basis,” and now the reason for this shoddy narrative revival exercise is because…the media says the perpetrators are white. The same media that’s been wrong about everything for years? Also, did you catch the real meaning behind this article? If we don’t do anything, racial solidarity could be at risk. So, lie your ass off about who’s committing Asian hate crimes so we can manufacture a false reality to make us feel better about race in America. That’s not healthy. 

Keep reading