Is your bathroom scale racist?

A new Harvard exhibition interrogates the white man's scales and measures.

How can science denialism be a growing trend when dogmatic belief in The Science is more demanded of the faithful than ever before?

It’s actually pretty simple, you see. The Science tells us that all are equal, with women and nonwhites more equal than others, so any instrument that tells us that isn’t always true is wrong, perhaps due to sinister bias built into the tool to undermine the self-esteems of BIPoCs.

Thus, from the Washington Post news section:

Harvard exhibit weighs in on history of colonial measurements

At first, before its inevitable slide into Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion, this sounds like a museum version of Nate Bargatze’s wonderful skits as George Washington prophesying a curious national future, including a free America in which 2000 pounds is called a “ton.”

“And what will 1000 pounds be called, sir?” a Continental soldier asks the Father of the Country.

“Nothing. … Because we will have no word for that.”

Of course the premise of Bargatze’s skit is backward: in reality, independent America inherited a hilariously arbitrary set of measures from England and mostly didn’t change things (although we got rid of the unneeded “u” in “colour.” I bet that somewhere a grad student is writing a dissertation on how Noah Webster reducing “colour” from an impressive-looking six letter word to a functional five letter word demeans People of Colo(u)r.

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