Know what'll solve all our racial problems and bring peace to our divided society? Sticking it to some old white dead guy for funsies.
Woke astronomers - yep, apparently that’s a thing now - are suddenly demanding a celestial body be renamed in order to thumb their nose at a centuries-deceased explorer.
According to this, some US scientists, who've clearly nothing better to do with their time than sit around being offended by history and griping about oppressive white people who've been pushing up daisies for the better part of 500 years, say the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, named after 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, should be renamed, as Magellan was one of those evil, racist colonizers we’ve all been told to be mad about.
A little background, here. Unlike their name may suggest, the Magellanic Clouds aren’t the puffy white (wait, is that racist, too?) clumps of water vapor you see in the sky. They’re actually dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy that appear as fuzzy whitish blobs on a clear night - ergo, “clouds.” And humanity's known about them for a hot minute. Some scientists believe some South American rock drawings that date back to ancient times make reference to these galaxies, while Persian astronomers appear to have noted them as early as 964 A.D. But they weren’t reported in Europe until the 16th Century, when they were documented following Portuguese voyages including Magellan’s famous global circumnavigation from 1519 to 1522. Eventually, the heavenly bodies came to be known as the “Magellanic Clouds.”
Which, to any ordinary person with common sense, would at this point just be considered a name. But if we’ve learned anything about the woke brigade, it’s that their utter contempt for white people, history, and the spread of Western civilization cannot be abated.
For example, Mia de los Reyes, an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College in Massachusetts, called Magellan “a colonizer, a slaver and a murderer,” demanding the star clusters be renamed as well as “other astronomical objects, institutions, and facilities that bear his name,” which would include several telescopes, spacecrafts, and craters.
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“I and many other astronomers believe that astronomical objects and facilities should not be named after Magellan, or after anyone else with a violent colonialist legacy,” de los Reyes wrote in the American Physical Society journal.
Yep. That’ll show him. Bad dead dude.
De los Reyes claims she's got a whole coalition of astronomers backing her demands
The Daily Mail reports the Large Magellanic Cloud is 160,000 light years away from Earth, while the Small Magellanic Cloud is around 200,000 light years away.
Which is still closer to us than leftists are to reality.