Writing in The Atlantic, Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph laments the August 21 eclipse “along most of its path, there live almost no black people.” I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to conclude that the heavens, in this first year of the Trump administration, are being controlled by racists, or whether (more likely) Americans of African descent tend to be concentrated in urban locales which take up very little of the land area of the nation.
The eclipse’s path was only 70 miles or so wide, after all, and if it were to appear above territory in which 13 percent (the national average) of the residents were black, it would have to zigzag around to include many metropolitan areas and possibly the swath of rural counties running from Virginia to Arkansas and Louisiana where a majority of residents are black. Hard to arrange, even for science.
