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In August 2017, two right-wing web sites falsely reported that a law professor had written that a 2017 solar eclipse was racist. First, the Daily Caller published an article headlined The Eclipse Is Racist Because It Fails to Affect Enough Black People, the Atlantic Suggests, stating that The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, has determined that the total eclipse of the sun due to occur on Monday will fail to affect enough black people. The following day, the Conservative Tribune asserted in a similar vein: Are you looking forward to Monday’s solar eclipse — the first full eclipse to hit the United States in decades? You filthy, filthy racist. That’s at least the take of Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph, who used a staggering 4,544 words in The Atlantic to explaining why the phenomenon of the moon blocking the sun just wasn’t diverse enough for her tastes. Both web sites were referring to an essay by Alice Ristroph, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York. Her essay, originally published in Democracy under the title Blackout, and republished by the Atlantic on 18 August 2017, did not state -- or even imply -- that the eclipse itself or the path of its totality were racist. Nor did Ristroph say or imply that the eclipse would not be visible to enough black people, or that those who chose to view the eclipse were racists. Instead, Ristroph penned a lyric essay that used the path of the eclipse as a literary mechanism to explore the United States' troubled racial history of totality and division. In noting that the path of the eclipse would cross sections of the United States in which there lived almost no black people, Ristroph was clear to state that this circumstance was a coincidence (from an astronomical standpoint) but used that fact as an opportunity to examine the historical reasons why some areas of America remain predominantly non-black. Along the way, she discussed different visions of totality, such as Oregon's original goal of being an all-white state, and General William Tecumseh Sherman's vision of total war during the U.S. Civil War. At no point did Ristroph use the word racist, and she explicitly made the (blindingly obvious) point that the eclipse itself did not harbor any racial prejudice: In 2015, the Daily Caller similarly prevaricated about a New York Times opinion piece on the subject of low visitation rates at national parks by minorities. Under the headline Now America's National Parks Are Racist, the Daily Caller wrote: One again, the Daily Caller completely misrepresented the thrust of a race-related discussion. The New York Times article in question, by Glenn Nelson, did not decry either America's national parks or the National Park Service as being racist, nor did that word appear anywhere in Nelson's piece. The gist of Nelson's article was that attendance at U.S. national parks by minorities was comparatively low, that a primary reason for that phenomenon was unfamiliarity with national parks among minorities, and that the National Park Service should try to encourage broader visitation through outreach aimed at clearing up such unfamiliarity. Nelson did not assert, as the Daily Caller misrepresented, that minorities are unwelcome at U.S. national parks. In fact, he argued the opposite -- that the National Park Service should attempt to dispel the misperception among minorities that they were not welcome at national parks: On 12 January 2017, President Barack Obama took up that suggestion, issuing a memorandum on Diversity and Inclusion in Our National Parks that directed federal agencies (among other actions) to engage in conducting active outreach to diverse populations and identifying and making improvements to existing programs to increase visitation and access by diverse populations -- particularly minority, low-income, and disabled populations and tribal communities.
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