In today’s competitive grievance culture, unearthing new sorrows, or reheating old sorrows, can require prodigious, indeed bewildering, feats of contortion. And so, in the pages of The Atlantic, we find one Alice Ristroph railing at the heavens. First, a little context:

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. The moon’s shadow will be about 70 miles wide, and it will race across the country faster than the speed of sound, exiting the eastern seaboard shortly before 3pm local time.

Clouds permitting, it should be quite a thing to witness.

It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.

There we go. If that one caught you off guard, here’s another:

As the eclipse approaches, the temperature will fall and birds will roost, and then, suddenly, the lights will go out. For each place within the path of totality, the darkness will last a minute, maybe two, and then daylight will return. Oregon, where this begins, is almost entirely white. The 10 percent or so of state residents who do not identify as white are predominantly Latino, American Indian, Alaskan, or Asian. 

This goes on for some time. It’s an attempt at symbolism, I think. A beverage may be useful.

It is a matter of population density, and more specifically geographic variations in population density by race, for which the sun and the moon cannot be held responsible. Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.

The message, it seems, is that people – specifically, black ones – aren’t arranged geographically as Professor Ristroph would wish.

From Oregon, the eclipse will travel through Idaho and Wyoming… Percentage-wise, Idaho and Wyoming are even whiter than Oregon… The few non-white residents of Idaho and Wyoming are not black — they are mostly Latino, American Indian, and Alaskan. 

Perhaps this demographic bean-counting is all building to some kind of point, a moment of profundity. 

From Kansas, the eclipse goes to Missouri, still mostly bypassing black people. 

Surely a contender for The Most Woke Sentence Yet Uttered.

Moving east, the eclipse will pass part of St. Louis, whose overall population is nearly half black. But the black residents are concentrated in the northern half of the metropolitan area, and the total eclipse crosses only the southern half.

If you laughed at that, tittered even, you’re a terrible, terrible person.

Don’t try this at home. No, really. Don’t. || A heartwarming moment of cross-cultural bonding. (h/t, Holborn) || How to make a blockbuster movie trailer. || It seems we need a bigger bomb-bay. || Impress your friends with fingertip bling. || A partial list of parenthetical pop songs. || Wouldn’t it be nice. || Riposte of note. || A partial success. || Always respect the media. || So many X-Men. || This. (h/t, Damian) || Air conditioner with bonus features. || All aboard. || Debussy plays Debussy, 1913. || Enterprise-D virtual tour revisited. Watch out for the dead crew member and the creepy apparition in the turbolift. || Handmade oak and brass phone cases. || On the origins of chili con carne. || No, you first. || And finally, especially for American readers, “Look, the stars are coming out.”

Want to thwart the life chances of black students? Then hey, become an educator. Say, a professor of Medieval literature at the City University of New York:

In an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, Dr A W Strouse argues that colleges should support “greater linguistic diversity” and “affirm and embrace” language differences among students, such as the use of slang and African American Vernacular English. Affirming students’ use of non-standard English is important, he says, because students who speak nonstandard English may feel discouraged if called out for it.

Correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can, we’re told, “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry.” Yes, personal growth can do that, especially when overdue.

“Already, scholars of rhetoric believe, as the consensus view, that instructors should not try to change their students’ speech patterns,” Strouse writes. “In the classroom, students shut down in the face of pedantry because they hate when bossy teachers tell them how to talk, especially in cases in which bourgeois white teachers dictate ex cathedra about what speech is ‘correct.’”

Bourgeois white teachers. No prizes for guessing where this is going. And it occurs to me that whether speech patterns are ‘correct’ may depend on whether you’re being understood, or sufficiently precise – say, in class. Or on whether you’re employable.

Further, he declares that the academic norms that privilege standard English should be suspect, because they can justify the judgment of “people’s intelligence based on dubious standards.”

Well, if you’re an employer and trying to thin a pile of job applications, repeated errors of even simple grammar and spelling are, inevitably, going to be a big help, given their tendency to correspond with, and thereby signal, both carelessness and intellectual imprecision. If someone is apparently too distracted to proofread their own job application, that’s unlikely to inspire great confidence. However, Dr Strouse has foreseen this practical problem and proposes a bold, if unorthodox, solution:

When asked why he believes it’s important to embrace and support alternative types of English, especially those that are typically frowned upon in the workplace, Strouse said employers shouldn’t dictate how their employees speak. “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” he declared. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’”

And a long and satisfying employment history will no doubt follow.

You see, Dr Strouse is – in his mind, at least – “dismantling linguistic racism.” And he’s doing this using minority students as his little foot soldiers. How very brave of him. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. Because by the time any sufficiently credulous students have pinned their hopes upon it, it won’t be his problem.

Further to this, Glenn Reynolds on the Google memo saga: 

The Damore firing, and [CEO, Sundar] Pichai’s disgraceful handling of it, represents colossal damage to Google’s brand. In essence, it’s an announcement — by a company that has access to everyone’s data — that it endorses the notion of thought-crime.

Heather Mac Donald on divining phantom prejudice: 

The attempt to find systemic police bias has come to this: the difference between an officer saying “uh” and saying “that, that’s.” According to Stanford University researchers, police officers in Oakland, California, use one of those verbal tics more often with white drivers and the other more often with black drivers. If you can guess which tic conveys “respect” and which “disrespect,” you may have a career ahead of you in the exploding field of bias psychology.

Howard Husock on the fallout of “affirmative action”: 

Liberals should ponder the implications of what we’ve learned to date about Harvard admissions. Blacks can score 400 points lower than Asians on the SAT, and almost as much less than whites, and still get admitted. In an earlier time, blacks were told that they must be “twice as good” as whites to get into school or make partner at a law firm; they are now being told that they need only be half as good… Why work hard when less effort will be rewarded in the same way? Inevitably, this logic means that those African-Americans whose work really is twice as good are nonetheless suspected of being sub-par — a dispiriting fate. Who would ever want to be viewed as having been hired (or retained) for reasons other than one’s capabilities — say, fear of litigation?

Jackson Richman on the same: 

Chunyan Li, a board member of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said: “Who is to say Obama’s daughters should have preference over a Chinatown cook’s son?”

Oh, and according to the founder of Vox and Daily Kos, you’re all Nazis now. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Instapundit quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Berkeley faculty’s fear of their own students: 

The University of California at Berkeley played down news last summer that it had installed an “escape hatch” from protesters in the chancellor’s office. The term was “the concoction of a 19-year-old headline writer,” a university spokesman said, referring to the student reporter who broke the story. “It’s a door,” the rep said, later adding that campus security thought it was “beneficial” to have more than one exit. But internal emails we’ve seen show that a staff “deeply disturbed by [recent] occupations” did build the exit to protect themselves from potentially dangerous students.

A $9,000 security door. Oh, and a $700,000 security fence to keep the agitated Mao-lings out of the home of former Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks.

Enabling and excusing all that leftist psychodrama sure is expensive.