COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Roscoe L. Koontz was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1922. He graduated from Vashon High School in St. Louis. His college education at Stowes Teachers College was interrupted by a three-year hitch in the U.S. Army during World War II. While in the army, he received technical training through a special pre-engineering army training program at West Virginia State College. Upon discharge from the army in 1946, he returned to Tennessee State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.
Roscoe Koontz was among the first formally trained Health Physicists by participated in the first Atomic Energy Health Physics Fellowship Training Program, sponsored at the University of Rochester in 1948. As a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Mr. Koontz conducted research on problems concerning neutron dosimetry, toxicology of uranium, plutonium and fission products. At Atomics International, a company in Southern California, which designs reactors, he developed techniques and procedures for measuring absolute thermal neutron fluxes using radioactive indium foils. He designed a pinhole gamma ray camera and collimator and helped to design and fabricate automatic air and water sampling equipment and radiation activity measuring devices.
Health Physics became a recognized profession around 1942. When Koontz entered the field, there were few rules and guidelines and procedures for Health Physicists to follow. Together with their instructors, the early students, like Koontz, originated many of today's practices, instrumentation and techniques to protect people from the hazards of ionizing radiation.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Crear-Perry is the founder of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, and because of this role, she was contacted by media outlets to provide a quote following the December 2017 death of activist Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner. Garner died at the age of 27 from peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare form of heart failure found in women who have recently given birth. In response, Ob-Gyn Crear-Perry researched more information on the condition’s risk factors:
To my chagrin, I found “African-American descent” or Black race listed among risks such as history of cardiac disorders and poor nourishment. This underscored that, as mainstream media are finally writing about how Black women in the United States are the most likely of this country’s women to die from pregnancy-related complications, we need to talk about how we talk about race, risk and maternal death.
Just as “woman” is not listed as a risk factor that can contribute to maternal mortality, neither should racial or ethnic categories, she asserts. “Instead, we need to start telling the truth: It’s exposure to racism that is the risk factor,” Crear-Perry writes. She continues:
Based on well-established data, risk factors are categorized as modifiable or nonmodifiable, and health-care providers use them to counsel patients on how they can avoid or decrease their likelihood of death or disease. Knowing the risk factors allows patients to do things like get tested earlier for an illness or, for example, participate in a smoking cessation program. Risk factors can include attributes like fair skin for melanoma, which you can’t modify but you can cover or add sunscreen. But no one’s saying that Whiteness is a risk factor for melanoma.
Crear-Perry emphasizes that assumptions held by many in both the media and health care professions allow them to readily—and often without supporting proof—link race with poverty, as a reason behind the fact that Black women die at rates three times higher than White women in pregnacy-related deaths. Yet, she writes:
Despite our nation’s vast wealth and the tremendous amount of resources spent on health care services, women in the United States die within a year of childbirth more than women in any other nation with an advanced economy. And research shows us what Black women have always known: We can’t buy or educate our way out of dying in childbirth or having our babies die. Black women who live in affluent neighborhoods, receive prenatal care in the first trimester, are normal weight, and have advanced degrees are still more likely to die or have their baby die than white women in poor neighborhoods, with no prenatal care, who are obese, and don’t have a high school diploma.
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Fellow doctors have been some of the most prominent defenders of J. Marion Sims, the controversial “father of gynecology.” The Atlantic: The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves
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Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.
The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.
That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park.
The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. Sims was one of their own. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America.
The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by the historian G.J. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known. Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. The man who once admitted “if there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” took to gynecology with a “monomania” once he realized it was his ticket to fame and fortune, writes Barker-Benfield.
In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. The most fervent of them was Lawrence I. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. Marion Sims, but to praise him.” He then announced that his institution, the Medical University of South Carolina, which Sims also attended, was raising $750,000 for an endowed chair named after J. Marion Sims.
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The Senate on Wednesday voted to get rid of a consumer protection measure meant to stop car dealers from charging more for car loans based on race. And the vote is just the start of lawmakers’ attempts to target years of federal agencies’ decisions through the Congressional Review Act, the GOP’s new favorite deregulatory toy.
Senators voted 51-47 in favor of a resolution introduced by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) that would undo the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s auto lending guidance meant to cut down on discrimination. The guidance targets “dealer markups,” where car dealers charge additional interest on top of what third-party lenders charge.
The vote was largely along party lines, except for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who voted yes. The House has yet to take up the measure.
Research shows high dealer markups often disproportionately affect nonwhite people — in other words, car dealers charge black and Latino buyers higher interest markups than they do white buyers. The CFPB tried to curtail this by introducing the guidance, a sort of notice of how to apply and interpret a law, in 2013.
Congressional Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to scrap the guidance. Dating back to 1996, the law allows Congress to review federal regulations and, by joint resolution, overrule those regulations within 60 legislative days of their enactment. And once rules are scrapped via the CRA, agencies are prohibited from issuing “substantially similar” rules to be enacted — ever.
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The most surprising Pulitzer Prize Monday came at the very end: The last prize to be announced. It was in the music category, and it went to Kendrick Lamar, the first hip-hop artist to win in the category.
There were no gasps and no questions about Lamar’s award in the World Room at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, although DJ Monday Blue, a.k.a.Tracey Blue, played Lamar’s “DNA” when the ceremony ended. One couldn’t be sure that those in the room knew who Lamar was. But out in the world, the selection was hailed.
“Kendrick Lamar deserves his Pulitzer. Rap is the most significant music of our time,” heralded a headline in the Washington Post.
“Kendrick Lamar Wins Pulitzer in ‘Big Moment for Hip-Hop’” the New York Times agreed.
On Tuesday on “Democracy Now!” hip-hop educator Bryan Mooney, whose North Bergen, N.J., high school class Lamar visited in 2015, called Lamar a “masterful storyteller” and praised his command of language. The award showed that “rap music and hip-hop culture can be used to teach and learn.” While hip-hop doesn’t put much stock in establishment institutions, he said, “It’s nice to get the recognition.”
After stepping down from her announcement platform, Dana Canedy, the former New York Times journalist who in July was elected the first African American Pulitzer Prize administrator, told Journal-isms that Lamar was the unanimous choice of the 17-member Pulitzer board last week.
The Pulitzer music jury “was starting to talk about the nominated work that was influenced by hip-hop,” Canedy said. Jury members then decided that if they could consider work influenced by hip-hop, “then they could consider hip-hop.” They became very excited and took their thoughts to the Pulitzer Board.
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Burkina Faso is a landlocked country, closer to the desert than the ocean. Its cities are freighted with dust, beaten into submission by the harsh sun, red, hard-packed earth, potholed, black-tarred roads, and sturdy but uninspired greenery, buildings, modern and traditional, crowding each other, all of it shrouded in a layer of fast change, the wider ambitioms of the region, and deep melancholy.
Ibrahima Sanlé Sory first began taking photographs here in the late 1950s, documenting highway wrecks near his hometown of Bobo-Dioulasso, in what was the new nation of Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso. He risked crashes every day riding around on a motorbike chasing photos. He also made a name for himself photographing the country’s emerging music scene and illustrating record sleeves.
But he didn’t truly find his voice until 1960, the same year Upper Volta gained its independence from France, when he opened Volta Photo, his portrait studio. It was here that he gave shape and tangible form to the changes in his country. These photos, taken throughout the decade and into the 1980s, captured the heady and transformative mood of a young country. He was aided by distinctive costumes and backdrops, smart staging, and perspective-heavy compositions closer to Renaissance painting than photography. He portrayed his subjects with vibrancy, tongue-in-cheek wit, and deep compassion. They leave one breathless. They are like liner notes of a new culture.
The backdrops, some of which Sory commissioned from artists in Ghana, Benin, and Ivory Coast, seethe with the energy of escapism, brim with fantasy—a man, Air Afrique suitcase in hand, stands in front of an airplane with its door open, boarding-stairs leading to the freedom of an imagined city, an imagined life. (Sory says this backdrop was particularly popular with people who hadn’t traveled.) The props range from medieval armor to modern-day boom boxes, muscular embodiments singing with the global promise that black culture in this part of Africa held in the 1970’s.
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A rule of thumb that is pretty useful: Any political figure who says that they want to help the “white working class” is much more interested in helping white people than in helping the working class.
Ever since Donald Trump swept into power with the help of some people from Wisconsin and West Virginia, there has been a grand national obsession with the political implications of the “white working class.” On a strictly rational basis, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. “Working class” in this context is used as a proxy for “lower-income people with jobs.” In fact, lower income Americans voted strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton. The two factors that correlated most strongly with voting for Trump were being white and having low levels of formal education. It would make more sense for the post-election fascination to have been with “ignorant white people.” Or—to more accurately capture the full demographic range of Trump voters—“racists.”
Perhaps the “white working class” focus is the result of a genuine newfound concern with the working class of America? That thesis is suspect as well. Concern for the working class is rooted, first and foremost, in concern about the deprivations suffered by everyone whose labor does not afford them the ability to thrive in our society. Lack of affordable health care, lack of affordable housing, lack of quality education, lack of political power, the impossibility of building wealth due to persistent low wages, vulnerability to all forms of exploitation—these are the problems of the working class. These are the issues that any political leader who wants to help the working class must face. And, if we are going to divide the working class into demographic subgroups, which group is most in need of help with these problems?
The black working class.
In America, black people have higher unemployment, lower incomes, worse health care, and far, far less wealth than any other racial group in this country. White people are actually the most well-off portion of the working class, and of every other class. It is inconceivable that ostentatious concern for the “white working class” could be motivated by a genuine desire to help solve the problems of all working class people. If the motivation was a simple desire to help the working class, everyone would say that we must pay attention to the working class. If the motivation was to help the neediest and most left-behind portion of the working class, everyone would say that we must help the black working class. To make a point of saying that we must help the “white working class” is to actively exclude the neediest segment of the working class from the conversation. In America, it is always safe to assume that this sort of thing is motivated by racism. It may be subconscious racism, but it is racism nonetheless. And racism has always been a reliable vote-getting strategy for the right wing.
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A black Alabama woman who lost a job offer because she refused to cut her dreadlocks is asking the Supreme Court to hear her case.
On April 4, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a petition to add EEOC v.Catastrophe Management Solutions to the Court’s docket — a case with serious implications for how racial discrimination in the workplace is defined.
The case revolves around Chastity Jones, an Alabama woman who was offered a job as a customer service representative at a call center in Mobile in 2010. During the interview,Jones wore her hair in short, natural locs and was dressed in a business suit and pumps. An HR manager later told Jones that dreadlocks violated the company’s grooming policy because they “tend to get messy.” She told Jones she couldn’t wear her hair that way at work, and when Jones refused to cut her locs, the job offer was rescinded.
Since then, Jones has been locked in a legal battle with the company over its decision. Jones contends that the issue was a clear example of racial discrimination. The company, Catastrophe Management Solutions, says its decision was merely a grooming policy unrelated to race.
In 2013, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Alabama company, arguing that the HR manager denied Jones a job based on the harmful racial stereotype that African-American hair is naturally unprofessional. The federal district court in Alabama dismissed the claim, saying that racial discrimination must show bias based on traits that a person cannot change, like skin color, and that a hairstyle doesn’t fit into that category because it can be changed. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling in 2016 and then declined to hold a full en banc review of the case in December 2017.
Now Jones wants the Supreme Court to weigh in.
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