Stellar Racism: Black Holes and Brown Dwarfs

Recently, a Dallas county commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (melanin expression: low) used the term “black hole” to describe a bureaucracy in the county, to which another commissioner, John Wiley Price (melanin expression: higher), objected and corrected his esteemed colleague by saying that the bureaucracy was a “white hole”.

The presiding judge, Thomas Jones (melanin expression: higher) demanded an apology from Mayfield for his “racially insensitive analogy”. You can read the story here, Dallas County officials spar over ‘black hole’ comment

Now, most people know what a black hole is. One may form when a large star explodes and provided there’s enough mass, voila ! (correct me as deemed necessary).

It’s an astronomical term with no racial undertones, it appears that Mr. Wiley and Mr. Jones are not guilty of PC policing but of ignorance. I’m not sure which is worse, I’ll leave that to the peanut gallery.

For my part, I’m Mexican and vertically-challenged so can I roll with Wiley and Jones’ outrage when I hear the astronomical term, brown dwarf?

Now that I think about it, brown dwarf is pretty offensive. I’m suing astronomy, the corpses of Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, Copernicus, and Gene Roddenberry. Why stop there? We’ll go after NASA, JPL, the European Space Agency, Jill Tarter (the hegemonic and oppressive xenophobe who coined the phrase) and George Lucas (maybe I can recover the money I’ve spent on his Star Wars brand through the years).

Where’s Jackie Chiles when you need him?