Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jewel Plummer Cobb (born 1924), a cell biologist and cell physiologist, and largely known for her work with skin pigment and melanin, has encouraged women and ethnic minorities to enter the sciences. An educator and researcher, she contributed to the field of chemotherapy with her research on how drugs affected cancer cells.
Cobb was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 17, 1924, and spent her childhood as an only child. She is from the third generation of the Plummer family who sought a career in medical science. Her grandfather, a freed slave, graduated from Howard University in 1898 and became a pharmacist. Her father, Frank V. Plummer, became a physician after he graduated from Cornell University, where he helped found the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. Her mother, Carriebel (Cole) Plummer, taught dance and was a physical education teacher.
(con't.)
Becoming a noted cell biologist was a difficult road for Cobb. Because she was African American, she faced segregation during the course of her education. Although she came from an upper-middle-class background, Cobb found that she had to go to black Chicago public schools. Cobb was in constant contact with African American professionals and was well aware of their accomplishments. She decided not to let anything stand in the way of her own success.
Supplementing her education with books from her father's library, Cobb had access to scientific journals and magazines, current event periodicals, and materials on successful African Americans. Although Cobb was at first interested in becoming a physical education teacher like her mother and aunt, she found that she was interested in biology when, in her sophomore year in high school, she studied cells through a microscope. An honors student, Cobb showed academic promise. She had a solid education and a drive to learn.
Although her interest in biology could have led her to become a medical doctor, Cobb was not interested in working directly with the sick. She was, nonetheless, interested in the theory of disease, an interest that later led her to become one of the leading cancer researchers in the United States
When it came time to enroll in college, Cobb selected the University of Michigan. Due to the segregation of the dormitories at the university, all African Americans, regardless of their year of study, were forced to live in one house. In disgust at the racism still found there, Cobb left the University of Michigan after three semesters and earned her B.A. in biology from traditionally black Talladega College in Alabama.
Cobb applied for a teaching fellowship at New York University. Because of her race, she was at first turned down for the position. Cobb refused to accept the rejection and personally visited the college, which then accepted her because her credentials were so impressive. In 1945, Cobb started her career in teaching as a fellow there. In 1947, she earned an M.S. in cell physiology and in 1950 she earned a Ph.D. in cell physiology from New York University. Her dissertation was titled "Mechanisms of Pigment Formation."
Cobb was named an independent investigator for the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1949. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cancer Research Foundation of Harlem Hospital and at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A picture is worth a thousand words. WNYC: Map: NYPD Finds Most Guns Outside Stop-and-Frisk Hotspots.
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly argue the main purpose of stop-and-frisk is to get guns off the street. Out of more than 685,000 stops in 2011, about 770 guns were recovered. That means about one tenth of one percent of all stops result in the seizure of a gun.
But those guns are not showing up in the places where the police are devoting the most stop-and-frisk resources.
Using data from the New York City police department, WNYC mapped all street stops by police that resulted in the recovery of a gun last year. The digital map shows an interesting pattern. We located all the "hot spots" where stop and frisks are concentrated in the city, and found that most guns were recovered on people outside those hot spots—meaning police aren't finding guns where they're looking the hardest.
Take the East Concourse section of the Bronx, where each block typically sees fewer than a hundred stops a year. Police found 25 guns there. But travel a short way toward Hunts Point, to three blocks that each saw more than 400 stops last year, and police found only two guns there.
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This is the first time I became aware of this problem, but the DOJ is looking into racial disparities in the pardon system. ProPublica: Obama Administration Wants Review of Prisoner’s Commutation Request.
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The Obama administration has asked for a fresh review of an Alabama federal inmate's commutation request and directed the Justice Department to conduct its first ever in-depth analysis of recommendations for presidential pardons, according to several officials and individuals involved.
The Office of Pardon Attorney has been at the center of growing controversy since December, when stories published by ProPublica and The Washington Post revealed a racial disparity in pardons. White applicants were four times more likely to receive presidential mercy than minorities. African Americans had the least chance of success.
A subsequent story published in May recounted the saga of Clarence Aaron, a first-time offender sentenced in 1993 to three life terms in prison for his role in a drug conspiracy. In 2008, the pardon attorney recommended that President George W. Bush deny Aaron's request for a commutation even though his application had the support of the prosecutor's office that tried him and the judge who sentenced him. The pardon attorney, Ronald L. Rodgers, did not fully disclose that information to the White House.
The handling of Aaron's case prompted widespread criticism that the pardon office-- which has rejected applications at an unprecedented pace under Rodgers--is not giving clemency requests proper consideration.
Clarence Aaron was sentenced to three life terms in federal prison without parole for abetting a drug conspiracy. In 2001, he applied for a presidential commutation but was ultimately denied. Now, the Obama administration has asked for a fresh review of Aaron's request. (Photo courtesy of PBS FRONTLINE)
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Wells Fargo's $175 million settlement might be too little, too late for many blacks and Latinos. The Root: Mortgage Bias: Economic Jim Crow.
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The mortgage crisis of 2008 has revealed the true color of money: black and white. On July 12, Wells Fargo -- the largest residential mortgage lender in the United States -- agreed to a $175 million settlement in a racial-discrimination suit brought by the Department of Justice. The case originated with charges first alleged by the city of Baltimore four years ago, in which officials accused Wells Fargo of "systemic discrimination" -- steering African-American and Latino borrowers into high-cost loans and charging them excessive fees.
Critics agree that $175 million is only a small fraction of the damage done, but it represents the second-largest fair-lending settlement in the DOJ's history. It follows last year's $335 million settlement with Bank of America over similar accusations arising from the practices of Countrywide Financial -- the mortgage unit that Bank of America acquired in 2008. SunTrust Bank was also assessed a $21 million fee for engaging in discriminatory lending practices just two months ago, and investigations are ongoing at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other major lenders.
What is disturbing is that as a condition of the settlement agreements, all three companies refused to admit guilt -- instead, each concluded that settling was a way to avoid years of litigation. As such, no criminal charges were brought, nor punitive damages applied. And despite all the hopes of good intentions, it is quite likely that these practices will continue.
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A new study has found that support for voter ID laws, especially among those who lean Democratic, is linked to one's feelings toward African Americans. Black Voices: Voter ID Law Support Linked To Attitudes About African Americans, Study Finds.
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In the study, conducted by the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication, respondents were asked several questions, and their answers were used to create a spectrum of "racial resentment." The more resentment a person conveyed, the more likely they were to support voter ID laws.
Voter ID laws require people to show some form of government identification before they can cast a ballot. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 32 states have some form of voter ID law, with varying degrees of strictness. Since Republicans won control of 20 state governments in the 2010 midterms, at least 11 states have pushed through voter ID laws. Supporters of the laws say that they help prevent voter fraud, in spite of the fact that studies have shown electoral fraud to be exceedingly rare.
Black, Latino, low-income and younger voters are all less likely to have official government identification -- and are all also more likely to vote for Democrats.
"These findings suggest that Americans' attitudes about race play an important role in driving their views on voter ID laws," said Paul Brewer, one of the researchers who supervised the study.
Those who identified as Republicans or conservatives have the highest score on the measure of racial resentment. But self-identified Republicans and conservatives favor the laws regardless of where they fell on resentment matrix. It was those respondents who identified as Democrats and liberals whose stances were most likely to be informed by racial resentment.
"Who votes in America has always been controversial, so much so that the U.S. Constitution has been amended a number of times to protect voting eligibility and rights," said David Wilson, the study's other supervisor. "It comes as no surprise that Republicans support these laws more than Democrats. But what is surprising is the level at which Democrats and liberals also support the laws."
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Politics meet demographics. ColorLines: Why Our Vision of America’s Future Must Count People of Color’s Needs.
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A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting of demographers and policy advocates where I experienced a revelation. The Center for American Progress (gigantic DC-based think tank) and Policy Link (major research and action institute based in Oakland, California) are working on a massive report about the policy implications of the nation’s changing demographics. I am on an advisory committee for the project.
We focused on the age/race correlation in changing demographics. According to a report by Policy Link and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at USC, we’ve basically got old people who are 80 percent white, and young people who are at least 50 percent of color. In the places where this generational racial gap is most pronounced, like Arizona, there has been a disinvestment in the social and economic supports that young people need - cuts in education funding, barriers to accessing health care, growth in criminalizing policies, and so on.
Manuel Pastor, a professor of geography and American Studies at the University of Southern California, and a leader of the study, has noted that, “Where the old don’t see themselves reflected in the young, there’s less investment in the future.” In Arizona, recent politics have revealed not just that older white people are not interested in young communities of color, but rather that a powerful block among them (definitely not all of them) are actively hostile and supporting punitive policies with racist impact like the ethnic studies ban and SB 1070.
In the meeting, I noted that a certain line of reasoning emerges as people grapple with these realities. The line goes something like this: “if older white folk are uninterested in investing in communities that don’t look like them, then they themselves will suffer because much of our infrastructure will come apart. We won’t have a skilled educated workforce, and that will create huge gaps in our ability to produce, compete and care for ourselves as a nation. White folk withhold support for a safety net/public education/comprehensive immigration reform at their own peril.”
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Demetria L. Lucas weighs in on the "Sorry, I'm not an Angry Black Woman" phenomenon. Essence: Does Battling a Stereotype Wear You Out?
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Situations like these, in which we come face to face with the Fear of the Angry Black Woman, are the equivalent of that ever-circulating story about an old white woman holding a bucket of quarters when she gets in a Vegas elevator with two imposing Black men. One man tells the other to "hit the floor"; the lady thinks he's talking to her and that she’s about to be robbed, so she throws her bucket of quarters into the air and hits the carpet. According to urban legend (and the story has been debunked), it was Michael Jordan asking Eddie Murphy to press the elevator button. Some others -- not all -- expect Black men to rob them; they expect Black women to “go off.”
This isn't some new post-reality TV phenomenon. Years ago at the beginning of my very first job, I was called into the office of my boss' boss unexpectedly. I arrived to find my supervisor in a chair, holding the edits of an annual report I'd recently submitted. I took my seat, and she began to go over the relatively minor changes in front of the higher-up. I didn't get it. Edits are a standard part of the job, and her concerns weren't global or an indication that I couldn't perform the work. I just needed feedback. I asked her if there was a reason she hadn't come to me first, before moving up the chain of command. She looked at me and stuttered, "I ... I just didn't know how you would react. I just wanted someone else around."
Huh? I can only recall "going off" once in my life, a regrettable moment fueled by too much of the Good Stuff. But in an office setting (and for that matter, everywhere else), I'm direct but unfailingly polite and civilized, just like my family raised me to be. There's no logical reason for anyone to believe I'll get loud and nasty, and I definitely don't get violent.
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Now this would be must watch TV. Slate: Dear HBO, There is a television series you need to make. It will be dramatic. And important. And you can rehire all the actors from The Wire.
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We did Mad Men, the well-lit, glossy “before” picture of white America, taken just as the civil rights movement was about to upend Madison Avenue’s cushy status quo. And we’ve done The Wire, the gritty “after” shot of urban America in the wake of white flight and the drug war. But we skipped the middle chapter. We haven’t done the part about how America stopped being Mad Men and turned into The Wire. That would be the story of the failure of racial integration in the 1970s.
The reason this chapter is missing—both from television and from our collective pop-culture narrative in general—is because it’s ugly. Most of America’s history with race is ugly, but it’s ugly in a way that’s tailor-made for Hollywood’s preferred mode of storytelling: good guys and bad guys. Protagonist and antagonist. Conflict and resolution. The North fought the South and Lincoln freed the slaves—The End. The noble Negro children of Birmingham stood up to Bull Connor, Martin Luther King went to the mountaintop, and white people learned a lesson—The End. Is this a reductive way to look at history? Yes. But it can be done; the narrative building blocks are there. The Civil War and the civil rights movement are both more complex than we typically portray them, but both were fundamentally matters of right vs. wrong, and anything that’s a matter of right vs. wrong can generally be reduced to good guys and bad guys.
Then we come to the story of integration in the 1970s. Where desegregation was a matter of right vs. wrong, integration was a matter of who gets what. Once the walls of Jim Crow came down, blacks had won access to society’s resources. But what did that mean, exactly? How much were they owed as compensation for America’s crimes? How much were white people willing to share? How much could white people be compelled to share? In a world of economic scarcity, these were messy, divisive questions; nobody had put a great deal of forethought into the answers. Meanwhile, inside the black community, integration appealed to those who wanted to share in the opportunities across the color line, but the idea of an open society threatened to undermine the power of black leaders and businessmen whose status was rooted in a separate, blacks-only world. The scramble over who gets what pitted not just black against white, but black against black as well.
When your story is a matter of who gets what, it’s a whole different kind of ugly. The grim saga of real estate integration—which would be your “A” storyline in any TV show about race in the 1970s—offers the clearest example. Republicans are typically cast as the bad guys in this narrative because, well, that’s how they cast themselves. They decided to be the zealots opposed to any and all forms of housing integration. In their bizarro world, that made them the good guys: They were the noble defenders of private property rights against “big government” encroachment (i.e, the extension of private property rights to blacks). In this role, when Lyndon Johnson was trying to pass the 1968 Fair Housing Act in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Republicans attached a series of amendments to the bill that rendered it impotent, incapable of forcing the issue of open housing on white neighborhoods.
And the Democrats let them. Got right on board with it. Voted it through, and declared the Fair Housing Act a triumph. Because it was more important for liberals to have an expedient, symbolic victory than to pass a bill that actually protected black America’s property rights. Subsequently, many of the public housing programs that Democrats did pass amounted to social engineering blunders of such astounding incompetence that the net result was to segregate the American cityscape even further and drive black neighborhoods deeper into poverty. Despite this spotty track record, white liberals have been on a sanctimonious victory lap ever since, beating their chests as the Righteous Friend of the Negro and raking in the lion’s share of the black vote every November when, really, the best you can say about them is that they’re not as horrible as the Republicans. Which isn’t a very high bar to clear. Can you find the good guys and the bad guys in that story? I can’t.
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The privy council's decision to block FG Hemisphere from collecting debt from the DRC will not benefit the country's people. The Guardian: Congo's victory against a 'vulture fund' is hollow.
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The judicial committee of the UK privy council, acting as the final court of appeal for the Jersey legal system, has ruled against "vulture fund" FG Hemisphere (FGH) in the latter's attempt to collect an old debt owed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Guardian has followed this case closely for some time and many people will see the DRC government's success as unalloyed good news. In fact, the victory is pyrrhic. First, because the people of the DRC will see no benefit. Second, because the campaign against vulture funds both directs the eye away from the primary cause of poverty in states such as the DRC – government corruption – and presents a misleadingly optimistic perspective on unconditional debt cancellation.
Campaigners have always maintained that if FGH is unable to collect the debt then the money will go instead to public works in the DRC. This is simply not true. The doctrine of "sovereign immunity" applies across the world and it is therefore not possible for any creditor, "vulture" or otherwise, to access funds that have a sovereign purpose – that is, public expenditure. Creditors can only target cash being used to trade.
In this case, the trading company is Gécamines – the "formerly" state-owned mining company. Central to the privy council's ruling was its view that Gécamines could no longer be considered a state asset, so its own assets could not be seized to pay a DRC debt. If Gécamines assets are not the DRC's, then they can certainly not be used to fund DRC public expenditure.
'The anti-vulture funds campaign diverts attention from the primary cause of poverty in the DRC – government corruption.' Photograph: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images
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