Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Dr. Cardinal Warde, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, is considered one of the world's leading experts on materials, devices and systems for optical information processing. Warde holds ten key patents on spatial light modulators, displays, and optical information processing systems. He is a co-inventor of the microchannel spatial light modulator, membrane-mirror light shutters based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), an optical bistable device, and a family of charge-transfer plate spatial light modulators.
Warde grew up on the small Caribbean island of Barbados. As a young boy he started making his own toys. In Barbados he attended St. Christopher's Boys School, Boys' Foundation School and Harrison College, and was a sprinter on the high-school track team. His parents demanded excellence of him in school, but gave him lots of freedom and support so he could engage his inquisitive mind outside the classroom. By age 16, he had converted his father's unused carpenter's shop into a chemistry and physics laboratory, and with his high school friends he was launching homemade rockets (with mice aboard) from the beach near his home. Fortunately, he says, none of his rockets escaped earth's gravity and most of the mice got their freedom when the rockets crashed.
(con't.)
After finishing high school in 1965, Warde boarded a plane for the United States. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969, where he was also a member of the school's varsity soccer team. His passion for physics continued into graduate school at Yale University where he earned M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in 1971 and 1974.
While at Yale, Warde invented a new interferometer that would work near absolute zero temperature in order to measure the refractive index and thickness of solid oxygen films for his Ph.D. research. This experience stimulated his keen passion for optics and optical engineering. Immediately after earning the Ph.D. Warde wrote letters to several of the leading engineering and science universities inquiring about possible appointment to their faculties. MIT responded to his inquiry, and he joined its faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1974 as an Assistant Professor.
At MIT Warde's interest shifted toward the engineering applications of optics. He became involved with other members of the faculty in the development of devices for enhancing the performance of optical atmospheric (wireless) communication systems to improve communication performance in inclement weather, and on the development of photorefractive materials for real-time holography and optical computing. To date, he has published over one hundred technical papers on optical materials, devices and systems.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Alain Dolium, one of France's few visible black politicians, rejects a label he sees as a trap. He'd rather deal with improving opportunities for all. The Root:I'm Not the French Obama!
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Alain Dolium is almost an oxymoron: He's a black French politician. A businessman and candidate for France's National Assembly in 2012, Dolium is indeed a rare breed. Despite the country's rich mix of whites, blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, and an Arab-Muslim population of more than 5 million, the French political establishment is almost exclusively white.
There is currently just one black elected official representing a mainland constituency in France's National Assembly, and no nonwhite mayors or other local elected officials in the nation of 63 million. Dolium, a businessman whose parents are from the French Caribbean, is an outspoken critic of France's virtual taboo against discussions of race and racism. "We have a giant hypocrisy," he said in an interview with The Root. "People who bring up race issues are seen as anti-republic.”
Yet, says Dolium, social, political and economic power is concentrated in one community (France's white majority). One reason, he says, is a mind-set that defines France firmly as it once was. "France has created an imaginary country. We still refer to 'our ancestors, the Gauls,' " he says. "The stream feeding France -- the Maghreb, Africa and Antilles -- is rejected by the French."
Dolium, 43, was born in Paris and raised in the industrial suburb of Malakoff. He attended the Ecole Supérieur de Commerce in Amiens, north of Paris, and graduate school in Montreal. He is an entrepreneur: CEO and co-founder of Obad, a mobile marketing company with offices in New York and Paris. He is a member of Mouvement Démocrate, France's centrist third party, popularly known as MoDem, and has been put forward as the head of the party's candidate list for the Paris region in next year's elections. If MoDem ends up winning -- or, more likely, forms a coalition with the winning party -- Dolium could be a candidate for a cabinet post.
Alain Dolium (right) with the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr
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When this story first broke there were all sorts of denials. But player Mohammed Belkacemi made a secret tape of meeting in November 2010 where race quotas in French football were discussed. Guardian: French football official admits blowing whistle in race row
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The crisis over French football chiefs' alleged plan to keep non-white players out of the national squad has escalated after a senior official admitted blowing the whistle and secretly recording a meeting about race.
French sport has been shaken by claims that football bosses wanted to limit the number of young black players and those of north African origin emerging as candidates for the national team. The secret plan for ethnic quotas allegedly involved limiting non-white youngsters entering the selection process through training centres as early as age 12 or 13. The investigative website Mediapart ran extracts from a transcript of a meeting last year where football bosses wanted to set a cap of 30% on players of certain origins. The site concluded that officials felt there were "too many blacks and Arabs" in French football and not enough whites.
The scandal has revealed a deep malaise over race in football and the notion that "Les Bleus", despite the multiracial 1998 World Cup winning team, are not patriotic enough unless they have white skin.
Two investigations are under way by the French Football Federation and the government, which expects to announce its findings on Monday. Meanwhile, the national technical director of the federation, Francois Blaquart, has been suspended.
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Even in fantasy worlds this stuff bubles through. Colorlines: Comics Industry Rep Accidentally Shows How Pop Culture Stays White
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Lost in the big news weekend was this gem of a piece by Racialicious’ Arturo R. Garcia, highlighting the effort to get Marvel Comics rep Tom Brevoort to come clean about race’s role in the creative process. The conversation was kicked off by an interview in which Brevoort discards the idea of an all-black lineup for an Avengers series, saying there weren’t enough black superhero characters who’d be suited for such a team — but then goes on to pull reasons out of the air for each member of an existing all-white Avengers lineup. Garcia details how comics fans, particularly @SonofBaldwin, approached Brevoort on Twitter over this. Brevoort, to his credit, is forthcoming with honest answers.
What results is a fascinating case study of how the stewards of popular culture understand race, and in turn, on how popular culture informs us about race. It should be noted that Brevoort’s no slouch on this stuff; check his excellent response to a fan complaining about too much diversity in his escapism:
I don’t know who you are, obviously, but just based on your question I would posit that you’re a white male. I think you cannot overestimate the power that readers, especially younger readers, seeing a heroic character that resembles themselves, can have. For white guys like me, that’s easy — there are hundreds of them. Not so for almost any other demographic you might choose to name. That’s why, I think, people are supportive and even delicate with any character of a particular race or orientation or background. It’s a diverse world out there, and any time we can reflect that diversity in a meaningful way, it’s worth doing.
Which is why it’s so frustrating to see Brevoort duck behind circular logic defenses here. To wit: there aren’t enough good non-white characters for a team, the lack of non-white characters is due to the less-enlightened racial agendas of the past, and correcting the agendas of the past is an agenda itself, so that’s out. Brevoort says on Twitter that social justice and cultural criticism are nice when possible, but entertainment and storytelling is job number one. (He also plays the “you’re subjected to racism, but I’m subjected to accusations of racism” canard.)
Setting aside whether accurate demographic representations count as ‘social justice,’ there’s a couple of problems here. First, nobody’s asking Marvel to release crap; at most, they’re asking for a chance to decide what’s crap. And second, social agendas work in storytelling. Just look at Marvel’s seven decades of white-male-as-neutral superheroes.
Garcia puts the issue in perspective:
What Brevoort doesn’t mention is that a comic-book company is perfectly suited to run a course-correction on whatever attitudes came from those “less-enlightened times,” because it deals with universes and characters of its own creation. […] When it comes to diversity, it appears the “contrivances” appear when they’re most convenient for the comics industry, as it does for so many others: there’s not enough qualified candidates; the market won’t support it; that’s not our job.
As Garcia alludes, these ‘contrivances of convenience’ show up in everything from whitewashed Hollywood casting to judicial politics — see the parallels in Melissa Harris-Perry’s case for an all-black, all-lesbian Supreme Court. This is a battle that gets fought in all industries, over billions of dollars, every day, in closed rooms — and we aren’t in those rooms.
Storm of Marvel's XMen
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New research suggests white audiences tend to stay away from movies featuring minorities due to the assumption that the film “wasn’t made for me.” Miller McCune: Why Whites Avoid Movies With Black Actors
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In terms of box-office grosses, this is an extraordinary week for Hollywood: The No. 1 movie in America features a mixed-race cast.
Granted, that movie is Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious action series. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris called these films “loud, ludicrous and
visually incoherent,” but added that they are “the most progressive force in Hollywood today.”
As Morris noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while black audiences want to see black characters, so they increasingly make films for each demographic.
Are they being too cynical? Newly published research suggests the answer is, sadly, no. But it also suggests this troubling tendency may largely be the effect of the studios’ all-too-effective marketing strategies.
In short, white moviegoers seem convinced that films with black stars are not made for
them.
Andrew Weaver of the Indiana University Department of Telecommunications explored how the racial makeup of the cast impacts the preferences of white filmgoers. Writing in the Journal of Communication, he described an experiment in which 68 white college undergraduates read 12 fictional synopses of new romantic comedies.
“Web pages were created for each movie, and the race of the characters was manipulated to create six versions: an all-white cast; a 70 percent white cast with two white leads; a 70 percent white cast with a white and a black lead; a 70 percent black cast with a white and a black lead; a 70 percent black cast with two black leads; and an all-black cast,” he noted.
After looking over the pages, which featured small photos of the principal cast members, participants were asked a series of questions about their moviegoing habits, racial attitudes and desire to see each movie, either in a theater or at home.
“The higher the percentage of black actors in the movie, the less interested white participants were in seeing the movie,” Weaver reports. “Importantly, this effect occurred regardless of participants’ racial attitudes or actors’ relative celebrity.”
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The future was now. And the revolution has been Tweeted. The mainstream print industry is under a digital assault, so what's to become of Black publications? Huffington Post: Ebony, Jet, Rolling Out, Defender: The Future of Black Publications.
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"There's no such thing as real-time, there's only the millisecond," states Munson Steed, publisher of Rolling Out, a national urban weekly. "Everything else is history. When you read the weeklies and the monthlies, you've already heard, saw, and received it on Twitter. And a lot of people don't want to say that."
A lot of people don't want to recognize that African-American publications are at a crossroads either.
Recently, the Columbia College Association of Black Journalists presented a dynamic panel of print media professionals to dialogue with Columbia journalism students about the current and future state of Black media.
The discussion was moderated by CCABJ president, and journalism student Jorian Seay. The panel included Steed, Kathy Cheney, (Chicago Defender), Candi Meriwether, (Jet magazine), Frances Moffett, (Gloss e-zine), and Mary C. Johns, (We The People Media).
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Teen armed with a bottle of Mountain Dew beaten by police. The Root: Feds won't prosecute Miles case
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Jordan Miles, a former student at Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts high school, was brutally beaten by three city police officers one January as he walked to his grandmother's house. The treatment of the eighteen-year-old violin player, whose charges were all dismissed by a district judge, has outraged many in the community.
In a huge blow to those who were waiting for justice, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today it has closed its investigation into the beating, explaining, "federal officials concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that the officers violated the teen’s rights.
The officers said they confronted Miles because he appeared to be "sneaking around," and that they used a stun gun because they saw an object in his pocket that they thought was a weapon, but that turned out to be a Mountain Dew bottle.
Miles says he ran because the officers didn’t identify themselves and, having never been in trouble with the law before, thought he was being robbed. He was charged him with a string of crimes that were all dismissed.
"The story just doesn't make sense when you read the affidavit," his attorney said.
That’s just one part of this story that doesn’t make sense. Another is what in the world (even if Miles were a real criminal) could possibly require that three men beat the face of one teenager to a bloody pulp?
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An appeals court chose African-American lives over white-owned land. BET: A Levee Blast Saves an Historic Black Illinois Town
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Nestled between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers is a small but historically significant town named Cairo, Illinois. It is referenced in the Mark Twain novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in the W.C. Handy song “St. Louis Blues.” Once a bustling river town, Cairo is now home to approximately 2,800 people, 70 percent of whom are African-American, and is struggling to survive deep poverty and a deteriorating infrastructure. Lately, it has literally been in the eye of a storm and very nearly washed away by floodwaters.
Late Monday night (May 2) and again on Tuesday (May 3), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted holes in a Mississippi River levee to prevent Cairo from flooding. The water level had reached a frightening 61.72 feet, and Cairo Mayor Judson Childs feared that his town would replicate the tragedy that occurred in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina.
Childs had to launch a legal battle to have the levee breached, which he won. Missouri officials objected to the plan because it meant flooding thousands of acres of farmland in the state and displace 200 people. In fact, when Missouri Republican House Speaker Steven Tilley was asked last week whether he preferred to see the farmland flooded or Cairo underwater, he replied, ”Cairo. I’ve been there. Trust me Cairo.” He later apologized for his insensitive remarks, claiming he was overzealous in defending his state.
But U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D), also a Missouri lawmaker, said that saving Cairo was the right thing to do.
“Cairo is an historic place. In the 1960s, early 70s, it was the height of a lot of racial upheaval,” said Clay. “Even the federal judge, who happens to be a friend of mine, and a cousin of Rush Limbaugh, believed it was right to save the town.”
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[] Haiti: Just When You Think It Can't Get Any Worse by Bev Bell