Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. (November 27, 1923 – May 1, 2011) was an African American nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer and mathematician, who gained first fame on entering the University of Chicago at age 13, becoming its youngest ever student. His intelligence led to him being referred to as a "negro genius" in the media.
As part of a widely varied and notable career, Wilkins contributed to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. He also gained fame working in and conducting nuclear physics research in both academia and industry. He wrote numerous scientific papers, served in various important posts, earned several significant awards and helped recruit minority students into the sciences. His career spanned seven decades and included significant contributions to pure and applied mathematics, civil and nuclear engineering, and optics.
Despite his stature and fame during his various careers he was not unaffected by the prevalent racism that existed for much of his life.
In 1940 Wilkins completed his B.Sc. in mathematics at age 17, then his M.Sc. at age 18, and finally went on to complete a Ph.D in mathematics at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1942 at age 19. In order to improve his rapport with the nuclear engineers reporting to him, Wilkins later received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mechanical engineering from New York University in 1957 and 1960, thus earning five science degrees during his life.
In 1944 he returned to the University of Chicago where he served first as an associate mathematical physicist and then as a physicist in its Metallurgical Laboratory, as part of the Manhattan Project. Working under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and Enrico Fermi, Wilkins researched the extraction of fissionable nuclear materials, but was not told of the research group's ultimate goal until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Wilkins was the codiscoverer or discoverer of a number of phenomena in physics such as the Wilkins Effect, plus the Wigner-Wilkins and Wilkins Spectra.
When Wilkins's team was about to be transferred to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (known at the time as site "X"), due to the Jim Crow laws of the Southern United States, Wilkins would have been prevented from working there. When Edward Teller was informed about this, he wrote a letter on September 18, 1944 to Harold Urey (who was the director of war research at Columbia at the time) of Wilkins's abilities, informing him about the problem of Wilkins's race, and recommending his services for a new position......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A little less than a year ago, then-candidate Donald Trump made his pitch to black and Latino voters: “What do you have to lose?”
More than six months into his presidency, Trump is giving a very clear answer to that question: quite a lot, actually.
Most recently, the New York Times reported that Trump’s Justice Department is reportedly setting up a team to potentially investigate and sue universities whose affirmative action policies supposedly discriminate against students based on their race. If this leads to schools pulling back affirmative action programs, this will likely hurt both black and Latino students. The research shows that, at least in some states, black and Latino people — who are already generally underrepresented in universities — see their representation further decline if affirmative action is banned.
But this is only the latest thing the Trump administration has done to pull back racial justice and civil rights gains. Here are a few other examples:
- Trump set up an “election integrity” commission to investigate, among other issues, voter fraud. The research, however, has shown time and time again that voter fraud is extremely rare to nonexistent. Still, the myth of voter fraud has been used to pass new restrictions on voting, which studies show disproportionately impact black and Latino voters. That seems to be what’s going on here, with Trump voicing his own support for strict voter ID laws and the commission setting the groundwork for voter roll purges.
- The Justice Department has pulled back investigations of local and state police forces. The Obama administration aggressively pursued these types of investigations, finding that police departments often discriminated against minority residents and using the findings to push for reforms. Without the investigations, the federal government isn’t going to have as much of a role in reforming police misconduct and discriminatory practices.
- Attorney General Jeff Sessions also asked prosecutors to begin enforcing mandatory minimum sentences even for low-level drug offenses, rescinding a memo from the Obama administration that asked law enforcement to lay off harsh punishments for people accused of nonviolent crimes. Historically, the harsh prison sentences have disproportionately impacted black Americans — with statistics showing that black people are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses even though they’re not more likely to use or sell drugs.
When you put this all together, a picture emerges of a Trump administration that is very actively working to roll back the racial justice and civil rights gains of the past several years and, particularly with voting rights and affirmative action, decades.
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A year ago, affirmative action in higher education seemed safe for a generation, after Justice Anthony Kennedy blessed it in a landmark Supreme Court opinion. Now President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is signaling that it plans to challenge the constitutionality of the practice in a way the federal government has never done before. And with Justice Neil Gorsuch in place and the possibility that Kennedy might retire in the next few years, the challenge could succeed. The legal reality is that higher ed affirmative action is now vulnerable.
The sense of security that followed Kennedy’s June 2016 opinion in Fisher v. Texas was a false one. Along with Kennedy’s liberal vote the same term in an important abortion case, Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the affirmative-action decision seemed like Kennedy’s attempt to cement his liberal legacy. Given that most observers expected Democrat Hillary Clinton to be elected president, Kennedy’s legacy was expected to remain intact when she nominated successor justices to Antonin Scalia and eventually to Kennedy himself.
In particular, Kennedy’s affirmative-action opinion embraced the theory that admissions officers at public universities may use diversity as their rationale to give several advantages to applicants of color. The idea goes all the way back to a solo concurring opinion by Justice Lewis Powell in a 1978 case called Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which embraced Harvard University’s description of its admission practices at the time.
As interpreted by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in a pair of 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan and by Kennedy last year, the diversity approach prohibits racial quotas. And it doesn’t allow universities to expressly give more points in an admissions system merely on the basis of race.
But diversity does permit admissions officers to make “holistic” judgments about applicants and curate a class that includes people from many different backgrounds. In practice, at the institutions that use the technique -- which is almost all major universities, whether state or private -- the racial balance ends up looking remarkably similar from year to year.
It was highly significant that Kennedy embraced the diversity rationale in 2016, because he had been a skeptic of affirmative action in the past, and had repeatedly voted to send the Texas case back to the lower courts, apparently trying to avoid issuing a definitive judgment. His opinion therefore seemed to settle the law, at least until the Supreme Court took on a different configuration.
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Hollywood projects famously come in pairs, from movies about asteroids to movies about Hercules, and that rule apparently holds true even when it comes to the highly specific subgenre of TV series envisioning an alternate end to the American Civil War. For the last two weeks, HBO and Game of Thronesshowrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been dealing with the backlash over the announcement of Confederate, a TV series set in a United States where the South successfully seceded and slavery remains legal below the Mason-Dixon Line. And now Amazon has revealed that it’s planning Black America, a series created by Will Packer and Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder in which, as a form of reparations, black Americans have annexed three former slave states and founded a country of their own called New Colonia.
The description, via Deadline:
Titled Black America, the drama hails from top feature producer Will Packer (Ride Along, Think Like A Man franchises, Straight Outta Compton) and Peabody-winning The Boondocks creator and Black Jesus co-creator Aaron McGruder. It envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny. The sovereign nation they formed, New Colonia, has had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with its looming “Big Neighbor,” both ally and foe, the United States. The past 150 years have been witness to military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc. Today, after two decades of peace with the U.S. and unprecedented growth, an ascendant New Colonia joins the ranks of major industrialized nations on the world stage as America slides into rapid decline. Inexorably tied together, the fate of two nations, indivisible, hangs in the balance.
Black America was first announced in February, but Amazon kept the show’s details under wraps, saying only that it would be vaguely along the lines of The Man in the High Castle. But the controversy over Confederate has prompted the company to show their hand, undoubtedly because the premise of Black Americasounds a lot like some of the things that critics behind the #NoConfederate campaign have suggested as possible alternatives.
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On July 28, comedian Lil Duval appeared on The Breakfast Club radio show, where he talked about killing trans women. The conversation centered around Janet Mock, a trans journalist whose advocacy work centers around bolstering the safety and lived experiences of trans people. Mock was on the show on July 25.
Lil Duval is unapologetic for his violent, transphobic comments, which can be viewed in the videos above. But organizers have mobilized to boycott the show using the hashtag #BoycottBreakfastClub, and The Marsha P. Johnson Institute is circulating a petition to demand an on-air apology for Mock, transgender people in general and Black trans women in particular.
Today (July 31), Mock penned a response to the abusive episode on Allure.com. Titled, “Dear Men of ‘The Breakfast Club’: Trans Women Aren’t a Prop, Ploy or Sexual Predators,” the essay starts with a discussion of why she appeared on the show.
I had watched previous interviews over the years and was familiar with their provocative and oftentimes problematic brand of talk. … Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly Black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely White, moneyed and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion and violence.
She goes on to write about the hosts’ reaction to Duval’s comments:
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Who gets to make art out of black pain? Two very different new movies show why it matters. Slate: Whose Streets, Whose Stories
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“Police brutality” or “use of excessive force” seem like insufficient terms to describe what took place at the Algiers Motel in Detroit in July 1967.
During a period of rioting and civil unrest in the city, a group of young black men, along with two young white women, were held captive and, according to many of these people themselves and other witnesses, physically abused and psychologically tortured by a trio of white cops over the course of many hours. At the end of that awful night, three of these young men were dead and one was in the hospital. The exact chronology of the night’s events was never clearly established. The accounts of surviving witnesses were inconsistent, which became a pretext for the entirely predictable not-guilty verdict eventually handed down to all three cops in court.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, written by her Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirtycollaborator Mark Boal, reconstructs that night at the Algiers Motel with the help of original reporting, creative license, and some inevitable conjecture, then jumps ahead abruptly to cover the legal and personal aftermath of the crimes. If it had to be given a genre classification, Detroitwould be called a docudrama. Bigelow mixes archival news footage and real crime-scene photos with re-enactments so vivid and brutal they sometimes seem to convert the movie theater into the Algiers Motel: a place to be fled as soon as possible. Detroit runs nearly two and a half hours, and the viewer feels every minute, in both the good and bad senses of that phrase. It’s an exercise in clammy cinematic claustrophobia, a vision of law enforcement as organized sadism that is itself a sadistic experience to endure.
Another new film, the 100-minute documentary Whose Streets?, which opens Aug. 11 takes an entirely different approach to a tragically analogous sequence of events that took place almost 50 years later: the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, and the months of street protests and community activism leading up to and following that officer’s nonindictment. Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, activists and first-time feature filmmakers from, respectively, South Central L.A. and St. Louis, have effectively crowdsourced their film, incorporating cellphone video taken during the actions and tweets from those observing and participating on the ground. (“I just saw someone die, OMFG” reads the chilling first tweet we see.)
In Detroit, the black characters become what the men in that motel were to their tormentors—vulnerable bodies to be used as needed.
Both Detroit and Whose Streets? move from a large-scale panoramic view of an urban community in crisis toward a more intimate portrait of a few of the individuals involved. But Whose Streets? is the more effective and emotionally powerful of the two, perhaps because it constructs its world from the ground up, not from the top down. This is another way of framing a fact that’s difficult to talk about (especially for a white critic) but important to note: The filmmaking team behind Whose Streets?is black, and the one behind Detroit is white. The question—a very live oneat this moment in history—of whose story is whose to tell is raised in a stark fashion by the release of these two movies in successive weeks at a moment when the civil rights of people of color (including nonwhite immigrants) are as imperiled as they’ve been since the days of those Detroit riots. Just this week, the NAACP issued its first-ever national travel advisory for the state of Missouri, declaring it a risky place for black Americans to move about freely.
In the spirit of Whose Streets?’s grassroots, from-the-ground-up approach, I’d like to take on a discussion of both movies not with a big idea about racial identity or artistic freedom but with some midsize observations about how each film works to create character, tension, and a sense of place.
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The conversation about equal access to education during the college admissions process — and the resulting bill for that education — were reignited after the New York Times reported Tuesday about a potential investigation by the Department of Justice on how affirmative action may discriminate against certain students.
A document obtained by the New York Times and circulated among the civil rights division of the US Justice Department indicates that the Trump administration is looking to shift resources, and start “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
While the New York Times report didn’t specify who the Justice Department might deem as at risk of facing discrimination based on affirmative action admissions policies, a statementfrom Department of Justice Director of Public Affairs Sarah Isgur Flores later indicated the case involved a “coalition of 64 Asian American associations.” The complaint, which was filed in May 2015, alleges racial discrimination against Asian Americans during the college admissions process.
According to Flores, the Justice Department is seeking volunteers to assist in the investigation.
In an academic setting, affirmative action programs have allowed students from historically disadvantaged groups — particularly women and people of color — with comparable or higher educational records as their peers extra consideration during the application process.
Despite initially vague reports, both critics and supporters of affirmative action spent yesterday debating the aim of its existence, as well as the perpetuation of the dubious myth that students who benefit from it, particularly those who are black, can go to college for little to no money.
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Millions of Rwandans will cast their votes on Friday in the country’s third presidential election since an estimated 800,000 people were killed in a genocide in the central African country 23 years ago. Few doubt the result of what even the most fervent supporters of the incumbent Paul Kagame admit is a one-sided contest.
One of Africa’s most divisive figures, Kagame is seen by many as an incorruptible and visionary leader who has brought security and development to a nation shattered by civil war and mass killings, yet he is reviled by others as a ruthless authoritarian propped up by a gullible and guilty international community.
The 59-year-old former rebel commander, in power for 17 years, won polls in 2003 and 2010 with 93% and 95% of the votes cast, and is standing for a third seven-year term following a constitutional reform which waived a previous two-term limit and was approved by 98% in a referendum.
Only two opposition candidates have been allowed to stand against him in this week’s poll, and neither is expected to make any significant impact.
At one vast rally organised by the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) party earlier this week in Burera, a northern district, Kagame told crowds that “elections mean choice”, exhorting them to “choose what is good for you”.
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