Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

By Andrea Plaid

Neil deGrasse Tyson. Courtesy: thehumanist.org

When I announced at Wednesday night’s late night editorial meeting–I’m still recovering from it!–who this week’s Crush is, the Owner/Editor exclaimed, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in passing, like walking by a small crowd cheering about something-or-other but just not having the time to push through the crowd to see what’s going on. All I heard was “Black guy,” “scientist,” “astrophysicist,” and “YYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!” I promised myself I’d check out the commotion later.

Later–much later, like the other day–I saw (and reblogged) this on my Tumblr dashboard:

It took James Cameron 60 weeks to prepare Titanic for its rerelease, but apart from remastering the original at 4k resolution and converting it to stereoscopic 3D, nothing about the movie has really changed.

Well, almost nothing.

According to Cameron: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year [April 15, at 4:20 am], in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.”

“And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.’”

So Tyson did just that, and Cameron re-shot the scene. According to the Telegraph, it is the only major technical change in the film’s re-release.

A Black astrophysicist corrected a white director that brought us that cog in the White Savior Industrial Complex, Avatar? YYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY! (Pssst–can you correct Cameron about that complex in Avatar, too, Dr. Tyson? Please?)

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