Or, Prattle Beyond The Stars: 

Physicists at MIT and SUNY Stony Brook recently announced findings that the total surface area of two black holes was maintained after the two entities merged. While this research was a welcome confirmation of both Stephen Hawking’s work and the theory of general relativity, it failed to address a crucial matter: what were its racial implications?

Heather Mac Donald browses an astronomy course at Cornell University, titled Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos, and premised on the question, “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” It seems unlikely that said course will enable any great scientific revelations, despite marshalling the combined forces of “Black Studies theorists” and the late jazz musician Sun Ra, who claimed to have visited Saturn; though it promises to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.” 

And so, while some observe the merging of bogglingly massive astronomical objects, others regard themselves as a more fascinating topic, and “conjure” their own “blackness.” Via farce, contrivance, and racial narcissism.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Robby Soave on achieving “equity”: 

The Vancouver School Board in British Columbia, Canada, is eliminating honours courses as part of a push to foster inclusivity and equity in the classroom. The board had previously eliminated the high school honours English programme, and maths and science will now get the axe as well. “By phasing out these courses, all students will have access to an inclusive model of education, and all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely,” said the school board in a statement.

By denying access, they are granting access, obviously. How terribly inclusive.

This is a spectacularly frank declaration: Education officials don’t like that some higher-achieving students are sorted into environments where they are more likely to succeed than their less-gifted peers, and would prefer to keep everyone officially at the same level to the greatest extent possible. The plan closely mirrors California’s recent efforts to discourage students who are proficient at math from taking calculus any earlier than their classmates; Canadian educators seem no less excited than their U.S. counterparts about naively pursuing equality of outcome at all costs.

Inevitably, the objections of students and parents were dismissed by educators, including Jennifer Katz, a professor of education at the University of British Columbia, as “nonsense” and perpetuating “systemic racism.” And so, the needs and prospects of gifted children will be sacrificed in the name of progressive piety. A piety that just happens to look like something else.

“The teacher did not appear to know she was being recorded.”

The inclusive, caring world of sixth grade education.

More here. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil… I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favour.

A dementedly racist woman, Aruna Khilanani, a woman who happily shares her fantasies of killing random white people, is invited to Yale to lecture the young and credulous. 

She’s a psychiatrist, by the way, presumably with paying patients. 

Note that if you challenge Ms Khilanani’s incoherent rambling, or her wildly arrogant generalisations, or her evasiveness and disregard for actual evidence, this is because you are “defensive,” being white, and are therefore “unable” to process her deep and radical wisdom. Including her conviction that “white people don’t eat bread.”  

Her talk, we’re assured, was “very well received.”

Update, via the comments:

Ms Khilanani is eager for the world to understand that she is a thinker, an intellectual. In large, bold letters, we’re told that,  

I may be one of the only [sic] psychiatrists in the country that has a Masters level body of knowledge in theory on marginalised identities… I majored in English at the University of Michigan, and completed a Masters of Humanities at the University of Chicago focusing [sic] gender theory, race theory, African American Studies, Embodiment, Post Colonialism, Sexuality, queer theory, Culture, South Asian Studies, and Marxism.

Grammar and proof-reading are not, one assumes, among Ms Khilanani’s many, many areas of focus and expertise. And curiously, the result of all this fierce rumination is a woman who struggles to support, or sustain, any kind of argument, and who appears unable to think in straight lines, such that one thing follows from another. Evidence is reliably absent, as is logical connective tissue. Instead, we get a series of bald assertions, quite a lot of blathering and deflection, and unrelated fragments of what can only be described as a bizarre conspiracy theory. We’re told, for instance, that expectations of racial reciprocity, mutual civility, would be a “false equivalence,” though why remains unclear, beyond the claim that white people are inherently defective, are “psychologically dependent on black rage,” and “have five holes in their brain.”

As a Boston high school sophomore, Keondre McClay said he was pressured by the head of a district-sponsored youth advocacy programme to attend an overnight retreat in Newton, where white adults asked the black teenager to wrestle out his emotions on a gym mat with them. They said it would help him purge his trauma from experiencing racism.

Um. A little odd. But hey, we mustn’t judge. After all, these are progressive, caring people, tumescent with compassion for the brown-and-therefore-downtrodden. 

McClay fled to his room. Jenny Sazama, the programme leader, and other retreat participants chased after him. For more than an hour, he recalled recently, they hugged him on his bed and entreated him to return to the group “counselling” session while he hid under the covers screaming, “Please leave me alone!”

As you can see, they care an awful lot. 

When they eventually left, he locked the door, but someone got the facilities manager to unlock it. McClay called someone to help him get home at midnight. “I was, for lack of a better word, assaulted,” said McClay, now 21.

Boston Public Schools saw fit to endorse this programme of “Re-Evaluation Counselling” for fifteen years. And the counsellors declare that they are “dedicated to eliminating racism in the world,” thereby enabling “deep relationships across racial lines.” Hence, one assumes, all the chasing and screaming.