Friday, July 11, 2008
Oh my. And you thought that the only danger from black holes would be on the day you got that spiffy new space ship and drove too close to one's event horizon, or had to sit through a mediocre movie. But no, there's a new danger, a more immediate danger that even Netflix non-subscribers face. You just might be a racist for even mentioning the term "black hole," as one Dallas County Commissioner has recently discovered. The full video on the controversy is here: Commissioner Defends Position That 'Black Hole' is Racist Term. Be sure to watch as one of the offended Commissioners defends his taking of offense after the fact.
Michael Graham (from whom, the link) comments:
...When a county commissioner in Texas complained about how a county office was a "black hole" for tickets, two of his fellow commissioners--both black--complained about his offensive remarks and demanded an apology. (The must-see video of this story is here.)
Seriously. I'm not making that up.
OK, actually, I did make it up. When I did stand up, I had a bit about stupid people being offended by phrases like "black hole," "nip in the air," "spic and span" and "red alert," which could be offensive to both American Indians or Chinese communists.
The most frightening part of this story is that, even after confronted with the fact that "black hole" has nothing to do with race and everything to do with cosmology, the county commissioners STILL demanded an apology. Why? "It doesn't matter if what he said was racist. What matters is that I'm offended."...
The commissioner who made the statement was apparently too classy to say, "Well I'm offended by your ignorance, so let's move on."
Let's take this as a teaching moment. What are Black Holes? You know what's sad? There will actually be some young black people who will fall for the idea that there's some racial implication in the term Black Hole and will be made uncomfortable by it rather than be drawn to learning more about this fascinating subject.
Update: Uh oh, beware the dwarf planets.
Not quite as stupid, but...
A co-worker told me of an incident that occurred at his previous employer. Apparently somebody filed a racism complaint, alleging that the company was experimenting with African-American corpses. Now this was an engineering company, so it sounds rather unlikely, right?
It seems that the complainant had seen a write-up about experiments in black-body radiation...
During a vacation in rural NY state, some of locals noticed that our trash cans were overturned. Someone said "looks like coons were rooting through the trash again"
One of our urban friends said "OMG, I can't believe you said that. That is so racist"
Of course the word 'coons' was a reference to raccoons. So, who was being racist?
Those of us who have been around Dallas for a while are use to John Wiley Price's antics. Every few years John Wiley goes off the deep end and makes a total total fool of himself.
Congratulations to him for finally achieving national-level idiot status.
ha! I like the post about dwarf planets. The term "dwarf" has actually been used in astronomy for nearly a century, both to refer to stars and galaxies (our sun is a G dwarf star, matter of fact). I worked on brown dwarfs for two years, actually. Fascinating little objects. While most astronomers are pretty liberal, I'm glad to see they pay no attention to this PC business.
Interesting tidbit: The plural in astronomy is dwarfs, not dwarves, probably because astronomers were never very good at spelling. Does that make it more PC?
How is it racis if it's talking about a force that pulles in objects and destroys them. Like the one at the center of are Galixy, like all other Galixys.
I mean African Americans shouldn't find it offensive if black holes are the same color as them. If anything they should be proud of it. Because if it weren't for black holes then we probely whouldn't be here.
Anyways people didn't name it to be mean to African Americans, they just named it based on what it is a hole that is black.