Okay, please excuse me if I get off topic or just generally DO NOT TAKE THIS 7TH GRADE SCIENCE TEACHER SERIOUSLY IN ANY WAY…
So now cicadas, or rather the lack of cicadas, is racist. At least in Indianapolis.
I'm not kidding!
And I can't even get words to paper on what this guy's talking about so I'm just gonna quote him:
But not everyone gets to bear witness to this emergence [of cicadas]. Almost as quickly as you notice their song, nature dials the volume down, right around 42nd Street. By 38th Street, there's not a cicada to be seen or heard…
Why is 38th Street the boundary line for cicadas in our city? It may seem arbitrary. But to those who know Indianapolis' history, 38th Street is one of the most obvious dividing lines in our city, as one of our main historical lines of segregation.
He goes on to blame the lack of cicadas on a waterway ironically named the White River which apparently is more polluted in underprivileged neighborhoods than it is in wealthy ones.
It doesn't matter that the city is currently working on a massive project to clean up the waterways. "On the surface [the project is] excellent," says a woman in one of the videos he linked to. "but....we're also looking at what kind of protections are there for people who live in that neighborhood who might get displaced because of the development that gets attracted afterwards."
GREAT ATTITUDE, GUYS!
Like, hello, it's 2021. We're paying attention now! And we have your back.
Back to the cicadas:
The lingering arsenic, mercury, and lead in water and soil impacts human health while also sickening or killing cicadas gestating underground.
So basically the city has been divided, the good areas are mostly for the whites, the bad areas are mostly for the blacks, and the cicadas aren't able to survive in those mostly-black neighborhoods because of pollution/overpopulation. And there's apparently no argument here: kids who come to school and ask, "Mr. Shah why are there are no cicadas in my neighborhood" are suffering the effects of environmental racism—even if they happen to be white, or Hispanic and are simply suffering from classism. And this makes Mr. Shah mad!
When students ask me why they haven't seen or heard the cicadas, I want to answer truthfully and completely. That means discussing the history of racial segregation in our city and the lasting effects of environmental injustice. But this answer will be seen by some as teaching "critical race theory."
Dude, this isn't Critical Race Theory—it's "Democrats ran cities and then those cities somehow became segregated and now we're living through the impact" theory.
Never forget, folks: Ibram X. Kendi and the CRT people want you to believe Capitalism is the epitome of racism, and that the founding of America was flawed to begin with. But what we have here isn't Capitalism at work. It's more like central planning.
And the left wants more central planning, not less.
