Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Benjamin T. Montgomery (1819–1877) was an influential African-American inventor, landowner, and freedman.
Ben Montgomery was born in captivity in Loudoun County, Virginia. In 1837, he was sold south, and purchased in Natchez, Mississippi by Joseph Emory Davis—whose brother, Jefferson Davis, later became the President of the Confederate States of America. Montgomery escaped but was recaptured. Davis reportedly "inquired closely into the cause of his dissatisfaction", whereby the two men reached a "mutual understanding" about the Montgomery's situation.
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Davis assigned Montgomery to run the general store of his plantation at Davis Bend. It was unusual for a slave to serve in this position. Impressed with his knowledge and abilities to run the store, Davis placed Montgomery in charge of overseeing the entirety of his purchasing and shipping operations on the plantation. The Davis family also taught him many other skills including land surveying, flood control, and architecture.
On May 21, 1847, Montgomery's son, Isaiah Montgomery, was born. Due to Ben's favored position among the Davis Bend slaves by the Davis family, Isaiah was also given the opportunity of receiving an education. Montgomery maintained a close relationship with his son up until his death.
Montgomery learned a variety of skills, including reading, writing, land surveying, flood control, architectural design, machine repair, and steamboat navigation.
Montgomery also worked as an inventor. In the late 1850s he applied for a patent for his design of a steam operated propeller to provide propulsion to boats in shallow water. Davis decided to address the problem and created a propellor that could cut into the water at different angles, thus allowing the boat to navigate more easily though shallow water. This was not a new invention, but an improvement on similar designs invented by John Stevens in 1804 and John Ericsson in 1838.(U.S. Patent 588) On June 10, 1858, on the basis that Ben, as a slave, was not a citizen of the United States, and thus could not apply for a patent in his name, he was denied this patent application in a ruling by the United States Attorney General's office, on the grounds that neither slaves nor their owners could receive patents on inventions devised by slaves........Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Nude is a description that has proved controversial, and never more so than in fashion. After all, it’s only nude if you’re white. Now a shopping aggregator is trying to redefine the word. The Guardian: The trouble with nudity in fashion.
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ude is the new black. Or rather it’s not, and therein lies the problem. Nudevotion, a click-through shopping aggregator, has cottoned on to this. Matching shoppers to their definition of nude, it offers a far wider palette of nude-appropiate clothes, shoes and makeup. Ideal if you’re not white.
The debate surrounding the word “nude” in fashion can be dated back to November 2009 when Michelle Obama wore a “nude” dress by Naeem Khan. The designer described it as “sterling-silver sequin, abstract floral, nude strapless gown”, leading Jezebel to quip, Nude for whom?, suggesting that there was no debate since, well, the nude in question (a sort of champagne pink) was only nude if you were a specific skin colour.
This proved especially problematic since nude went on to become one of the most prolific trends of the past five years. Christian Louboutin’s “nude” heels became a staple on the red carpet. Stuart Weitzman named his the “nudist”. Since then, the word has been slowly and correctly phased out. Mostly. Pantone still has a “nude” tone in its colour palette, and one of the definitions on Dictionary.com is, vaguely and semi-diplomatically, “a light grayish-yellow brown to brownish-pink colour”. In 2013, Louboutin launched multiples shades of “nude” shoes. But still, in wider circles, the word stuck.
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Persistent Racism in Housing Is a Tax on Blackness. Slate: A Tax on Blackness.
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Hoyt, as chief economist of the Federal Housing Authority, wanted to improve the accuracy of real-estate appraisals so that an affiliated agency—the Home Owner’ Loan Corporation, established by the Home Owners’ Refinancing Act of 1933—could standardize the process for making mortgage loans, avoid undue risks, and bail out homeowners who lost their homes in the economic crash. Working with Hoyt at the FHA, the HOLC would map cities and divide neighborhoods into various risk categories that were based on his ethnic hierarchy and coded accordingly. A “green” neighborhood was white, affluent, Anglo-Saxon, and appropriately Protestant. A “blue” one had less desirable whites—Jews, Irish, and Italians—but was stable and upwardly mobile. A “yellow” one had undesirable, often working-class whites, and a “red” one was predominantly black or Mexican, regardless of wealth or class. And in these “redlined” areas, loans were either expensive or nonexistent, forcing families to rely on speculators and private sales by unscrupulous homeowners.
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On Tuesday, New York magazine shined light on “the grim, racist methods of one Brooklyn landlord,” a developer who does most of his business in gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights. As a landlord, he explains, he works hard to get black people out of his buildings. “Everyone wants them to leave, not because we don’t like them, it’s just they’re messing up—they bring everything down. Not all of them.” He continues: “If there’s a black tenant in the house—in every building we have, I put in white tenants. They want to know if black people are going to be living there. So sometimes we have 10 apartments and everything is white, and then all of the sudden one tenant comes in with one black roommate, and they don’t like it. They see black people and get all riled up, they call me: ‘We’re not paying that much money to have black people live in the building.’ ”
This is obviously racist, but it’s also unsurprising. As the Hoyt story shows, this discrimination is in the DNA of American real estate. For most of the last century, lenders and brokers—including national realtor organizations—used race as a proxy for neighborhood value. “Appraisal manuals,” writes Pietila, “continued to repeat Hoyt’s hierarchy until the 1960s … implying that the groups lowest on the ladder were detrimental to housing values.” These manuals also pushed realtors and homeowners to use private agreements—called covenants—that forbade sale to “undesirable” neighbors.
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We see this in public opinion. Twenty-eight percent of whites support an individual homeowner’s right to discriminate on the basis of race when selling a home, note researchers in their analysis of the General Social Survey, a long-running study that measures Americans’ attitudes on a wide range of topics. Likewise, when asked in 2008, 20 percent of whites said their ideal neighborhood was all white, 25 percent said it had no blacks, and 33 percent said it had neither Hispanics nor Asians. And only 25 percent of white respondents said they would live in a neighborhood where one-half of their neighbors were black.
We see it in the actions of landlords and real-estate agents. Compared to whites, according to a 2013 study from the Urban Institute and Department of Housing and Urban Development, black renters learned about 11 percent fewer rental units and black homebuyers were shown roughly 20 percent fewer homes; Asian renters learned about 7 percent fewer properties, while Asian homebuyers also learned about 20 percent fewer homes; and Latino renters learned about 12 percent fewer units. (There was no difference in the treatment of Latino homebuyers.) As NPR points out in its analysis, this wasn’t a regional problem: Researchers ran their experiment in 28 different metropolitan regions, with similar results.
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When you get to interview one of the creators of Empire, you’re going to come out with a fascinating piece. But when the interview turned to the topic of diversity in Hollywood, things got really interesting. Slate: Why Lee Daniels Hates When White People Write for Black People on TV.
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After acknowledging Empire’s impact on pop culture and race within the industry, the magazine asked the others—Beau Willimon (House of Cards), Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers), Alex Gansa (Homeland), Michelle King (The Good Wife), and Sarah Treem (The Affair): “How much pressure do the rest of you feel to populate your show and writers room with diverse talent?”
The responses seemed honest. (Daniels’ Cookie Lyon-like gut reaction was “Ah, look at all these white people! Why would you ask that damn question?”) Lindelof admitted that plans to introduce a black family into The Leftovers were nearly scrapped once Empire became a huge hit. (“It felt like now we're just basically jumping on the bandwagon.”) For The Affair, Treem noted that she “specifically” sought out a writing room of “half men and half women,” to tell the dual perspectives of the relationship between the show’s lead characters. Daniels gave his unabashed, undoubtedly controversial take on things:
He continued:
Daniels: Are there any African-American writers on your show?
Gansa: There are not.
Daniels: How about yours?
King: Yeah.
Daniels: How many?
King: Last season there were two, but one of them went off to create her own pilot.
Daniels: Good. How many on your show? I'm just curious.
Willimon: How many women do you have?
Daniels: We have three women.
Willimon: How many Asian-Americans do you have?
Daniels: We have no Asian-Americans.
Willimon: Just, it's a weird question. But we have zero African-Americans in our writers’ room of six.
Daniels: I'm not here pointing a finger. I'm just curious.
Daniels may not be pointing a finger, but he is doing one of the things he does best—playing the part of provocateur. It’s a great thing to see, even necessary, especially when these questions are being asked by your peers, rather than just your audience or critics. And there’s something to be said for Daniels’ aformentioned distaste for “white people writing for black people” (which you shouldn’t take at face value considering the credited writing staff for Empire’s first season includes several non-black voices): It’s not enough for diversity to just appear on the screen. There should be a wider breadth of representation behind the camera, too. King noted that on the last season of The Good Wife, they had two black women on the writing staff, and that she found it “telling” when one of them said to her, "I've never been in a room where there's another African-American woman."
Lee Daniels
Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
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Military rounding up group who made violent bid to seize power while President Pierre Nkurunziza was out of the country. The Guardian: Burundi coup leaders arrested as aides say president heading for capital.
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Leaders of the attempted coup in Burundi were arrested on Friday after armed forces loyal to President Pierre Nkurunziza overpowered an attempt by generals to seize power while he was out of the country.
The rival groups had battled for control of the Burundi capital after a former intelligence chief launched a bid to take charge.
The efforts to overthrow Nkurunziza, who has sparked widespread unrest by trying to run for a third term, were apparently popular with the public but met with heavy armed opposition from military loyal to the president. A deputy leader of the coup admitted by Thursday night that it had failed.
Presidential aides said Nkurunziza, in Tanzania when the uprising was launched, had returned to the country to take charge and was heading for the capital, Bujumbura.
On Friday morning the leader of the coup attempt, former intelligence chief General Godefroid Niyombare, told AFP by phone: “We have decided to surrender … I hope they won’t kill us.”
A presidential spokesman told Reuters that Niyombare was arrested. Asked what would happen to him and other generals behind the coup bid, the spokesman said it was up to the justice system. “They will be held answerable,” he added.
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The defence of barbaric legal measures that African leaders like Jammeh tout as symbols of resistance to Western decadence were actually Western import. Slate: African Leader Tells Gay Men: “I Will Slit Your Throat”.
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Gambian President Yahya Jammeh—a dictator who came to power in a 1994 coup—is not a friend of the gays. In the past, Jammeh has called gays “vermin” that “we will fight,” described homosexuality as “evil, antihuman as well as anti-Allah,” and threatened to “cut off the head” of gays in Gambia. Last November, he signed a law that would impose a life sentence on anyone who has gay sex. His police force has been known to arrest Gambians suspected to be gay and threaten them with rape and torture.
It is no surprise, then, that Jammeh escalated his anti-gay rhetoric in a recent speech, making a vicious threat against every gay person who has dared to remain in Gambia. According to Vice News, Jammeh told a crowd:
If you do it [in the Gambia] I will slit your throat—if you are a man and want to marry another man in this country and we catch you, no one will ever set eyes on you again, and no white person can do anything about it.
Jammeh’s admonishment about throat-slitting is really par for the course at this point. What’s more interesting about his remark is the coda—the declaration that “no white person” can save Gambia’s gays. In a narrow sense, Jammeh was probably referring to the European Union’s decision to revoke about $14 million in aid last year in response to Gambia’s anti-gay brutality. (The EU is also considering blocking another aid package worth roughly $180 million this year, though Qatar, Kuwait, and Turkey have pledged to continue their assistance.) But in a broader sense, Jammeh was likely alluding to the idea—frequently peddled by anti-gay African leaders—that gay equality is a Western fiction being foisted upon Africa by condescending neocolonialists.
President Yahya Jammeh and his wife, Zineb Jammeh, at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit dinner hosted by President Barack Obama, Aug. 5, 2014.
Photo by Larry Downing/Reuters
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