Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Clarence "Skip" Ellis (born May 11, 1943, in south Chicago, Illinois) is an American computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[1]
Ellis had four brothers and sisters who were all raised by their single mother. At 15, Ellis got a job at a local company to help with the family bills. He worked the graveyard shift, working all night long. His main priority was to prevent break-ins and to watch over, but not touch, the company's new computer. In 1958 computers were very rare to own, so the protection of it was imperative. In Ellis's spare time at the insurance company he began to read the computer manuals that came with the machines. He taught himself the intricacies of the computer and became an expert.
The computer used punched cards to record and enter data. One day at work, Ellis single-handedly saved the company by fixing a crisis with the computer. They had run out of punch cards, but with a quick change of some of the settings on the computer, he found a way to make the old punch cards work perfectly.In 1964 he received a BS degree major in math and physics, from Beloit College. Clearance Ellis attended graduate school and received his PhD in computer Science from the University of Illinois where he worked on hardware, software, and applications of the IIIiac 4 Supercomputer. Clearance Ellis is the First African American to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1969. After his Ph.D., he continued his work on supercomputers at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Ellis has worked as researcher and developer at IBM, Xerox, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Los Alamos Scientific Labs and Argonne National Lab. His academic experience This experience changed his life and threw him into the computer science field.
Throughout high school, Ellis's teachers recommended that he attend summer school programs at the local universities in Chicago. This was his first encounter with college-level students and university life. Though poor, Ellis was able to obtain a scholarship to attend Beloit College in the fall of 1960.
In Ellis's junior year, a computer was donated to the college. He and his chemistry professor were asked to set it up. This single computer was the start of the campus's computer lab. This provided him the opportunity to develop his interest in computing......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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WHEN a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot an unarmed black teenager dead three years ago, the killing set off outrage across America over violence committed by police. (Barack Obama’s Department of Justice concluded that the officer acted in self defence.) But with greater public scrutiny of racial disparities in the use of force, better-disguised forms of inequality soon came to light as well. In March 2015 the department published a report on law enforcement in the city, which found that Ferguson’s criminal-justice system seemed to focus more on generating income for the government than on ensuring public safety. Nearly a quarter of the city’s general revenues came from criminal fines, fees and court costs. Moreover, black residents paid a far greater portion of these expenses than either their share of the population or their share of total crimes committed in Ferguson would indicate. The investigators concluded that the police had displayed “unlawful bias” against blacks.
The city appears to have heeded the Department of Justice’s message: fines and fees are down 77% from their peak in 2013. However, Ferguson was unlikely to be a unique outlier, and other cities engaging in similar practices might well have continued outside of the national spotlight. A new paper by Michael Sances of the University of Memphis and Hye Young You of Vanderbilt University published this month in the Journal of Politics found that Ferguson was indeed more of a rule than an exception. After examining data on 9,000 American cities, they found that those with more black residents consistently collected unusually high amounts of fines and fees—even after controlling for differences in income, education and crime levels. Cities with the largest shares (98%) of black residents collected an average of $12-$19 more per person than those with the smallest (0%) did.
However, there was one subgroup of cities that bucked the trend: the relationship between race and fines was only half as strong in places whose city councils included at least one black member. This may be because black politicians are likelier than white ones are to respond to complaints from black constituents. Black councillors might also intervene to stop certain policies, like increasing court fees, from going into effect to begin with.
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What the response to a police shooting sounds like when a black cop kills a white woman. Slate: “The Most Innocent Victim”
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The death of Justine Damond at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor on July 15 was a horrific tragedy. It was also the setup for a grim comparison: What would law enforcement officials, police union reps, and conservative pundits say if, instead of a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man, a black officer shot an unarmed white woman? To make the comparison even more direct, Damond—who’d lived for most of her life in Australia—was killed in the same part of the country where Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, both black men, were killed by police officers in 2015 and 2016 respectively. (Clark was shot by two officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, neither of whom were prosecuted; Castile was shot by an officer in nearby St. Anthony who was charged with manslaughter and acquitted.)
Reality did not disappoint the cynics. Within six days of Damond’s death, an attorney for her family had called her“the most innocent victim” of a police shooting he’d ever seen, and the mayor of Minneapolis had asked for and received the resignation of police chief Janeé Harteau. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a storypointing out that Bob Kroll, the leader of the local police union—who once referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as a “terrorist organization”—was being uncharacteristically silent when it came to the culpability of the Somali American Noor. When pressed on why he had been willing to defend the officers involved in Clark’s death but unwilling to defend Noor, Kroll told the Star-Tribunethat he hadn’t yet spoken to Noor’s lawyer and therefore didn’t have enough information to comment. “In this case, I don’t know the facts of it,” Kroll told a reporter in a series of text messages. “His attorney is handling and the Federation is remaining silent. This is how our board and attorney decided to handle this one.”
The episode is unquestionably more complicated than a brief summary of the facts might suggest. For one thing, it’s not clear who progressives can point to as the villain in the case: The mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, is a liberal who has shown a willingness to defend Black Lives Matter activists against police officers hostile to their cause, while the police chief who resigned was an openly gay Native American woman who embraced use-of-force reform. But one phenomenon this police killing has illustrated plainly and dramatically is the power of self-interested reasoning—the kind of flawed, ideological thinking that shows through when people need to protect their preexisting beliefs and irrational biases.
At a speech in Waconia, a city about 30 miles outside of Minneapolis, former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann expressed outrage over Damond’s death and zeroed in on the ethnicity of the police officer who killed her. She called him an “affirmative-action hire” and invited audience members to consider the possibility that Noor had shot Damond for “cultural” reasons. Later, in an interview with WorldNetDaily, Bachman was quoted as saying, “Noor comes from the mandated cover-up women culture. That’s why I’m wondering if they’ll ask whether his cultural views led him to shoot her. That’s something, if true, I can’t imagine the progressives would allow to get out.” As far as I can tell, this was the first time in recent years that Bachmann had commented on police violence, unless you count the “All Labs Matter” dog meme she tweeted two weeks after Castile’s death.
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The experience of a young lawyer raises difficult questions about race, belonging, and the bureaucracy of affirmative action in a country lauded for its egalitarian history. Foreign Policy: One Woman’s Fight to Claim Her ‘Blackness’ in Brazil
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When Maíra Mutti Araújo speaks, she draws out her vowels and pronounces them with a distinctively sharp tone. Her accent is immediately recognizable to Brazilians as typical of Salvador, a coastal city in the country’s northeast that is as famous for its beaches as its rich African heritage. Araújo grew up in Salvador, just like her mom. Her dad, who grew up in a rural town eight hours away, has lived there since college. She has her mom’s features — a broad nose, full lips — and her dad’s nut-brown complexion.
Araújo comes from a bookish family. Her parents met when they were both chemistry majors at a local university — they now work as middle school chemistry teachers. She got her law degree at the Federal University of Bahia, one of the country’s most prestigious. During her time in law school, Araújo began to consider a career in the civil service. She interned at the Federal Attorney General’s Office in Salvador while still a student and took a job as an analyst at the government accountability office in Manaus, in the state of Amazonas, after graduation. Her goal was to eventually become a prosecutor. “I love arguing cases,” Araújo says, “that whole process of taking a case and finding a solution for it.” As a prosecutor, she says, “you’re responsible for propelling the case forward. The outcome depends on your approach.”
In late 2015, Araújo set her sights on an attractive job opening for a prosecutor back in her hometown, in the Salvador municipal department. Everyone encouraged her to apply using a relatively new affirmative action option. “You of all people! You have to do it,” Araújo’s boss at the time told her. “If I had the chance to apply as a quotas candidate, I would totally go for it,” her friends said. “And you do! So apply!”
Since 2011, lawmakers in the state of Bahia and in Salvador, its capital, have enacted a series of measures aimed at tackling racial inequality. These include legal measures banning discrimination against followers of Afro-Brazilian religions, the creation of a committee to combat institutional racism, and racial quotas for government jobs. The policy efforts in Bahia reflected a national wave of legislation spurred by the landmark Statute of Racial Equality signed in 2010 by then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. After decades of fighting to be heard, Brazil’s black activist movements saw the concerns of the country’s black population — the largest, by some measures, of any country outside of Africa — become a political priority.
In 2012, the same year Araújo graduated from law school, Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court unanimously ruled that race-based quotas in universities were constitutional. Two years later, then-President Dilma Rousseff signed a law that guaranteed 20 percent of public sector jobs at the federal level for candidates who identified as negro — the Portuguese term used by the census department and embraced by black rights activists to denote African heritage and which encompasses the identities of preto (black) and pardo(brown or mixed-race). Bahia lawmakers went even further, reserving 30 percent of jobs in state and municipal departments for negro candidates. Like many such laws in Brazil, it will come up for review in 10 years.
That Bahia now provides the most extensive affirmative action mandates out of all Brazilian states is demographically fitting. Since the 1940s, Salvador has held a cherished reputation among locals and international visitors as the “Black Rome” of the Americas. Currently, more than three-quarters of baianos, as people from the state are called, identify as black or brown. According to the most recent census, Salvador is the blackest state capital in the country.
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In a recent New York Times profile of freshman California Senator Kamala Harris, her colleague and the senior senator representing the state — Dianne Feinstein — made a curious comment in response to a question about Harris' future as a national figure.
"She just got here," Feinstein explained though she did reportedly speak warmly of Harris, noting that she was "on the way to becoming" a good friend. Still, it's a curious statement given the current president of the United States is a businessman whose fortune was amassed through real estate, licensing his name to just about any product presented before him, reality television, and questionable universities. Not to mention his predecessor was formally a one-term U.S. senator and Illinois state senator.
The piece itself is a measured look at Harris' short but already headline-grabbing stint as senator with fans and critics alike having their say, but Feinstein's reaction makes me weary as it comes on the heels of other political pieces that stick to the status quo: white guys and all of their potential. While former Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander released an incredible campaign ad last year and has successfully managed to be pegged as a political star despite not holding elected office, his recent Washington Post profile touches on the 2020 question without the not so subtle invocation of "wait your turn."
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Former first lady Michelle Obama was a breath of fresh air Tuesday at a live armchair conversation with the Women’s Foundation of Colorado President Lauren Casteel in Denver. Poised and graceful as always, Obama still touched on some tough topics and spoke out frankly about the hurt she felt from the racist attacks she received while in the White House.
“The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” Obama said when Casteel asked her about the trials of being the first black first lady, according to the Denver Post. “Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country, there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin color.”
While her husband served as president of the United States, Obama was at the center of hateful, merciless attacks and comments. She was called an ape (and everything in between but a child of God), her body size and type were made fun of ... the list goes on and on.
But the ever-classy former FLOTUS, who reminded us all that “when they go low, we go high,” also reminded the women around her and around the world that despite the adversity they face, they can still hold on to their power.
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The percentage of black leaders at JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs is falling even as the U.S. workforce gets more diverse. Bloomberg: Black Executives Are Losing Ground at Some Big Banks
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Wall Street’s top bosses have pledged for years to boost diversity in their ranks. But the number of black people at some of the biggest U.S. banks is going in reverse.
At JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the percentage of senior black executives and managers fell over the past five years, according to U.S. workforce data compiled by Bloomberg. They make up no more than 2.6 percent of top positions at the three banks, lower than across corporate America, where the percentage is slightly better and ticking up.
Black diversity is also going backward for all U.S. employees at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America Corp., where the percentage of black workers slipped to 13.1 percent from 15.2 percent in 2012. All three lag the active U.S. workforce, which was 14.8 percent black in 2015, the most recent year for which nationwide data is available.
There’s no single explanation for what’s happened or what it will take for the country’s biggest banks to live up to their promises. Current and former black bankers and academics who study them point to Wall Street’s unwillingness or inability to make changes. They don’t see enough consistency or creativity about hiring new people and helping them thrive in an industry where few black bankers have made it to the top.
“Look, we can call it not caring, we can call it not having the will, we can call it not having incentives, not having accountability,” said Martin Davidson, a professor of leadership at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who has studied Wall Street’s diversity efforts. “Whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is there’s not enough energy and resources being put into figuring out how to catalyze this black talent.”
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