The woke Left’s long march through our institutions of higher learning has reached an astronomy course at Cornell University.
Astro 2034 “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” introduces “students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies.” Yes, really:
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.
And there we have it, friends, proof there is absolutely nothing the Left can’t find racism in or define through the narrow prism of race.
Related: Here We Go Again . . . Now Cheese Is Racist
In Astro 20434, Cornell astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri challenge that so-called conventional wisdom not through the latest scientifically sound astronomy textbooks, but through the works of black racial “theorists like Michelle Wright and Denise Ferreira da Silva; authors like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson; [and] music by Sun Ra, Outkast, and Janelle Monáe.”
According to Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, these black racialists, like Wright, are the wokest of the woke:
Emory University English professor Michelle 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.”
Not to be outdone, Afrofuturism author Octavia Butler writes science fiction that doesn’t feature “white male heroes who blast aliens and become the saviors of brown people.” For Butler, imagination and science fiction are “a strategy for surviving an unjust world on one’s own terms.” Her works take discrimination based on race, gender, class, or ability and puts it in contexts such as space and time travel:
Remember this upper-level “course fulfills Cornell’s science distribution requirement” in today’s World of Woke Ivy League, so along with their black racialism they also throw in a few “astronomy concepts” like–yawn– “the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.” The slow ooze of the woke leftist ideology has been infecting the humanities and the social sciences at our universities and colleges for decades, but now it’s clear it has a foothold in the actual sciences.
We know the Left never stops. We also know if a woke leftist looks hard enough for racism he/she/they/them will find it–even in the vastness of space–because to them, everything on earth is racist, so why not space, too?
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