Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
This man needs no introduction. He's an engineer, astronomer, and knowledgeable in agricultural matters. His name is Benjamin Banneker.
Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a slave. His grandfather had been a member of a royal family in Africa and was wise in agricultural endeavors. As a young man, he was allowed to enroll in a school run by Quakers and excelled in his studies, particularly in mathematics. Soon, he had progressed beyond the capabilities of his teacher and would often make up his own math problems in order to solve them.
One day his family was introduced to a man named Josef Levi who owned a watch. Young Benjamin was so fascinated by the object that Mr. Levi gave it to him to keep, explaining how it worked. Over the course of the next few days, Benjamin repeatedly took the watch apart and then put it back together. After borrowing a book on geometry and another on Isaac Newton's Principia (laws of motion) he made plans to build a larger version of the watch, mimicking a picture he had seen of a clock. After two years of designing the clock and carving each piece by hand, including the gears, Banneker had successfully created the first clock ever built in the United States. For the next thirty years, the clock kept perfect time.
In 1776, the Third Continental Congress met and submitted the Declaration of Independence from England. Soon thereafter, the Revolutionary War broke out and Banneker set out to grow crops of wheat in order to help feed American troops. His knowledge of soil gained from his grandfather allowed him to raise crops in areas which had previously stood barren for years......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Left to fend for themselves a day after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico and forced them into a primitive existence, San Juaneros took to the streets Thursday to do what they say Caribbean people do best: Figure it out.
No electricity? A mustachioed man in a white undershirt played traffic cop at a Santurce intersection. No ambulances? A daughter borrowed her brother's SUV to race her frail mother from the La Perla neighborhood to a hospital. No debris removal? A physician and two neighbors borrowed garden tools to clear main Condado thoroughfares on their own.
With the enormity of Maria’s destruction still unknown even to the overwhelmed Puerto Rican government, the capital’s storm-dazed residents ventured outside Thursday, clogging roadways while trying to bring some semblance of order to their bruised city.
Their task was so massive some just wandered the streets, gawking.
“Get busy!” implored Dr. Joseph Campos, a 52-year-old internist at the San Juan Veterans Administration hospital, tree-trimmer in hand as he and his neighbors cut down a tree partially blocking access to a highway. “Even if all you can do is pick up a single, little branch. I’m not eating, and I’m healthy, and I’m working. You don't have to sit home stress-eating.”
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It’s people who criticize racism who are silenced, not those who embrace it. Slate: The Real Political Correctness
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The ideology that put Donald Trump in the White House is one of victimhood as much as it’s one of resentment. As a candidate for president, Donald Trump did more than attack presumed outsiders like Muslims and Hispanic immigrants; he also quenched a thirst for a large group of Americans indignant about what they have suffered at the hands of others. But these supporters weren’t victims of any real oppression or exclusion—they saw themselves as victims of political correctness, living in a world where a liberal media suppressed truth in the name of supposed fairness.
But what they called truth was simply prejudice. The media won’t talk about immigrant crime or “radical Islamic terrorism,” argued Trump in a year’s worth of rallies and events—grossly distorting the reality of immigrant communities and violence in the Muslim world—but I will. When his supporters praised his honesty and bluntness, aka his political incorrectness, what they meant was his willingness to air bigotry as truth. For them, his public prejudice was a kind of liberation from an oppressive atmosphere of conformity.
The irony is that, the occasional high-profile backlash notwithstanding, few people are actually punished or ostracized for expressing Trump-like attitudes. This is clearly true in everyday life, where a sizable number of Americans hold and express white nationalist views but retain their jobs and relationships. It’s also true in the public sphere. Donald Trump is emblematic of this. Five years after stoking a racist conspiracy theory about the legitimacy of the U.S. president, he won the presidential nomination for the Republican Party, with only modest dissent from GOP elites. Put differently, Americans overestimatehow much anyone is ever sanctioned for explicit prejudice and racism. The political correctness so decried by Trump and other conservatives is more chimera than scourge.
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FOR three days in early September Hurricane Irma ground through the eastern Caribbean like a bulldozer made out of wind and rain. Tropical breezes became 300kph (185mph) blasts, turning “tin roofs into flying razor blades”, as Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross put it. Placid seas reared up in giant waves and rainwater coursed through streets. Even when the sun eventually came out the nightmare did not end. Shortages of food and water sparked looting on some islands. Survivors were grateful that fewer than 50 people, at last count, died in the Caribbean, but Irma’s fury left thousands homeless in the 13 island countries and territories in its path, including Cuba. Entire settlements were wiped off the map.
Most islanders want above all to return to normal life as fast as possible, which for many means reopening the hotels, bars, restaurants, surfing schools and the like that are the region’s economic lifeblood. Authorities on St Barthélemy, a territory that belongs to France, talk of reopening in time to catch part of peak tourist season, which starts in December.
But business as usual will not come back as quickly as the islanders hope. After Hurricane Ivan struck Grenada in 2004, tourism fell to 10% of its pre-storm level in the island’s first high season. Annual GDP dropped by 24%, though it recovered after that. The costs of rebuilding will be staggering. France’s public insurance agency estimates that it will cost €1.2bn ($1.4bn) to repair infrastructure in St Barthélemy and the French half of St Martin, an island of 75,000 people that France divides with the Netherlands. More than two-thirds of structures on St Martin were damaged or destroyed; on Barbuda nearly all were wrecked. In all, rebuilding the ruins in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, will cost nearly $13bn, according to the Centre for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology in Germany.
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Gift Ngoepe was the first African-born player to make it to the big show. Major League Baseball is betting he won't be the last. Foreign Policy: Baseball’s Billion-Person Cactus League
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When Gift Ngoepe jogged onto the infield at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park for the first time, the Pirates rookie’s heart was racing — and in his locker, his phone was blowing up.
“I heard from all over,” Ngoepe said of his April 26 Major League Baseball (MLB) debut. Interview requests poured in from “radio, magazines, newspapers. [Others] were congratulating me, giving me a lot of love and support from everybody.”
That kind of attention is to be expected when a baseball player realizes a lifelong dream. But Ngoepe’s calls weren’t just from his hometown, or his high school coach, or his local newspaper. They were coming from strangers in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, and other African countries: When Ngoepe took the field that April evening in front of a crowd of 16,904, he became the first African-born player to make the major leagues.
“When Gift does something, it blows up Facebook all over Africa,” said Garth Iorg, a nine-year MLB veteran who works with the league on international development.
Ngoepe is one in a billion — literally. He is the only player on a continent of more than 1 billion people to make it to the big show. And he doesn’t have much company in pro baseball’s minor leagues, either: There are just six active African minor leaguers, including, now, Ngoepe, who was demoted in June to the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate in Indianapolis after 28 games. For comparison, the Dominican Republic, a nation of just 10.2 million, has six Major League players… on the Pirates, Ngoepe’s team.
But Iorg and others are working to close that gap. The former Milwaukee Brewers first base coach has been heading MLB’s annual African Elite Camp for the past two years. As part of this event, tryouts are held in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa to select a group of 40 players for a tournament and training event held in South Africa. From 2011, when the event began, until 2015, at least one player was signed by an MLB organization each year.
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In lighting, makeup and camera calibration, cinema has pandered to white skin for decades. Now, a new generation of film-makers are keen to ensure people of color look as good on screen as they should. The Guardian: It’s lit! How film finally learned to light black skin
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Insecure, the HBO series currently in its terrific second season (#TeamMolly), has been garnering attention since its pilot for its refreshing look at the lives of a small group of black women in Los Angeles. Broadcast in the same slot as its precursor Girls, which showed women as their “real” messy selves, and before that Sex and the City, a fantasia of skipping round New York in Manolos, Insecure sits somewhere between the two. Its storylines are all too real, but it looks stylish and glamorous.
Previous incarnations of black characters on television have mainly been overlit sitcoms or overly gloomy slices of realism. Insecure is neither – and its actors look like bonafide movie stars.
There is an increasing amount of chatter about tackling questions of representation onscreen – which reached tipping point with the #OscarsSoWhitescandal and has been followed by a triumph for diversity with this week’s Emmy haul for people of colour. But the conversation about the aesthetics of representation – what people of colour actually look like on screen – is rarely addressed. Chronically bad lighting for black actors has been a problem ever since black actors first appeared on screen (and before that, to the era of blackface and minstrelry). I shudder when I think of the number of times I’ve watched a beautiful dark-skinned actor transformed into an ashy sallow spectre because too many film-makers fail to tailor their practice to making that actor look as good as everyone else.
“I don’t appreciate seeing black folks that are unlit,” 13th director Ava DuVernay said recently. “If there’s a dark brother, and if he’s in a frame with a lighter-skinned person, you don’t automatically light for the lighter-skinned person and leave him in shadow.”
But now things seem to be changing. Thanks to the likes of Insecure’s director of photography, Ava Berkofsky, who recently shared the tricks and tactics cinematographers can use to achieve on-screen black magic. Of these, the oldest trick in the book is the importance of moisturising the actors’ skin to give the lighting the most bounce (this was particularly important to Spike Lee when working in black and white on She’s Gotta Have It).
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The New York Times columnist has penned an unusually smart article identifying the late paleoconservative writer Samuel T. Francis as a prophet of Trumpism. This is a point others have made before, but Brooks is doing a public service by making Francis’s historical importance known to a wider audience. The only problem is that Brooks presents a distorted picture, portraying Francis as primarily a populist blemished by racism. According to Brooks, “Francis’ thought was infected by the same cancer that may destroy Trumpism. Francis was a racist. His friends and allies counseled him not to express his racist views openly, but people like that always go there, sooner or later.” Presented in this way, as an “infection” or “cancer,” racism seems like an external malady to an otherwise healthy body.
But racism was absolutely central to Francis, just as it is a cornerstone of right-wing populism in general, where it’s used as the glue to hold white people together. That’s the chief way it is distinguished from left-wing populism, which is organized along class, rather than racial, lines.
The fraudulence of Francis’s populism is apparent in Brooks’s praise of the writer’s “insight” that “politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts—religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite—were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.” If we group these binaries into their respective camps, what we get is a secular, globalist, non-white ruling class versus a religious, nationalist, white Middle America. But the American ruling class is neither secular nor non-white. These nonsensical categories only make sense to the degree that Francis’s populism was directed at mobilizing whites against non-whites, not at the ruling class.
In his columns, Francis returned to the need for a race-based politics time and again. He openly admired early-twentieth-century race theorists like Lothrop Stoddard and thought that David Duke offered a model for right-wing politics worth emulating. Brooks quotes Francis as having once said: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.” Despite quoting this, Brooks fails to ask how this racism was connected to Francis’s populism. Instead, he cordons off Francis’s racism as a discrete problem untied to his broader politics.
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Keith Ellison spent the two hours mostly in silence. The Democratic congressman from Minnesota—and deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee—flipped through a white binder, jotting notes with a royal blue pen that perfectly matched his tie. He typed into his plum-cased smartphone. He gestured to an empty seat for some latecomer slipping into the back of the room. Whenever a speaker mentioned his name, especially with a compliment, Ellison gave a thumbs-up. But mostly he was in receiving mode—the deferential host of a discussion on “ReCentering the Experiences of Black Women to Achieve Economic Justice” at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference in Washington.
The panel included the critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who pioneered the concept of intersectional feminism, which describes how overlapping systems of oppression like race and gender compound one another. (It’s “the way to analyze issues of equity,” Ellison stressed to the crowd.) Crenshaw was joined by Valerie Wilson, who directs the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy; Brittany Lewis, a doctorate research associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs; and Deborah Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation. An abundance of expertise for the issue at hand.
But Ellison had extra reason to provide a platform for these speakers this week. Black women are the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters, yet many of them are feeling neglected eight months into Donald Trump’s presidency. Symone Sanders, a Democratic strategist who served as Bernie Sanders’s press secretary during last year’s campaign, is fond of saying that “black women voted at 94 percent for Hillary Clinton, and they have yet to get a thank-you card.” Instead, many resent what they see as a new Democratic focus on chasing the white working class, which backed Trump. It’s one possible explanation for Wednesday’s Black Women’s Roundtable/ESSENCE poll showing an 11-point decline from last year in the percentage of black women who believe Democrats “best represented their interest.”
“It does not make logical sense, statistical sense, or any kind of sense that one can imagine to pour money into chasing a demographic that has not supported you for half a century, rather than watering the garden that’s in your own backyard,” Avis Jones-DeWeever, a policy advisor to the Black Women’s Roundtable, said during a presentation of the survey’s findings. On Thursday she stressed to me, “These findings need to be a wakeup call for the Democratic National Committee,” which “has made a political decision post–the 2016 election to put all their eggs in the basket of the white male electorate” and “basically distance themselves from black women.”
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