Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Michael Phillip Anderson (December 25, 1959 – February 1, 2003) was a United States Air Force officer and NASA astronaut, who was killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the craft disintegrated after reentry into the Earth's atmosphere.
Anderson was born in Plattsburgh, New York, into an Air Force family and grew up as a military brat. He attended high school in Cheney, Washington, while his father was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base, west of Spokane.
Michael P. Anderson
Anderson graduated from the University of Washington in 1981 and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. After completing a year of technical training at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, he was assigned to Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. At Randolph he served as Chief of Communication Maintenance for the 2015th Communication Squadron and later as Director of Information System Maintenance for the 1920th Information System Group.
In 1986 he was selected to attend Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma. Upon graduation he was assigned to the 2d Airborne Command and Control Squadron, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska as an EC-135 pilot, flying the Strategic Air Command's airborne command post code-named "Looking Glass." While stationed at Offutt, he completed his master's degree in physics at Creighton University in 1990.
From January 1991 to September 1992 he served as an aircraft commander and instructor pilot in the 920th Air Refueling Squadron, Wurtsmith Air Force Base, Michigan.
From September 1992 to February 1995 he was assigned as an instructor pilot and tactics officer in the 380th Air Refueling Wing, Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York.
Anderson logged over 3,000 hours of flight in various models of the KC-135 and the T-38A aircraft.
Selected by NASA in December 1994, Anderson reported to the Johnson Space Center in March 1995. He completed a year of training and evaluation, and was qualified for flight crew assignment as a mission specialist. Anderson was initially assigned technical duties in the Flight Support Branch of the Astronaut Office. Anderson flew on missions STS-89 and STS-107, logging over 593 hours in space.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Documentary Lab is an 18-month fellowship that provides one-on-one mentoring, networking resources and financial support for up-and-coming filmmakers of color. Color Lines: Firelight Media's Documentary Lab Is Looking for Diverse Stories
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The Documentary Lab, which Nelson launched in 2008, is an 18-month fellowship that provides one-on-one mentoring, networking resources and financial support for up-and-coming filmmakers of color as they work on projects from conception to completion. To help diversify the financial playing field, Firelight Media’s Next Step Media Fund offers fellows up to $25,000 for travel, shooting and editing to lessen the blow of final production money woes. The deadline for all submissions is June 17.
The organization has produced more than 25 hours of primetime programming for public television and had its first theatrical release in 2015 with “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.” Nevertheless, Firelight knows there’s still more work to do, per this emailed statement:
A lot has changed since we first started the Documentary Lab ten years ago. Documentaries have become popular, the number of distribution platforms have doubled, and almost everyone agrees that we are experiencing the golden age of documentaries. … Yet, there are still structural barriers for filmmakers of color to enter into the field. Ten years later we remain steadfast in our belief in the importance of people of color being able to tell their own stories. The Documentary Lab Open Call is an exciting time for us at Firelight because it puts us in direct contact with hundreds of emerging filmmakers of color from all over the U.S. telling nuanced and complex stories informed by their own lived experiences.
Firelight Media Lab fellow Débora Souza Silva behind the scenes of her 2019 documentary "Black Mothers".
Photo: Courtesy of Firelight Media, by Züri Obi-Louis.
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Brian Allen was driving home from work in July 2017 when he spotted someone from his days at Crenshaw High School. He stopped, they talked and he agreed to give the friend — an aspiring rapper with a criminal record — a ride.
A passing LAPD cruiser did a U-turn and pulled over Allen’s Nissan. Officers questioned both men and let them go.
But more than a year later, police notified Allen that he’d been added to CalGang, a controversial database of thousands of gang members and those in their orbits. Police alleged that he associates with gangs because, Allen suspects, he has been seen in gang areas — the South L.A. neighborhood where he lives — and with an alleged gang member — the old friend.
“I was stunned,” the 31-year-old dance instructor said. “You automatically get cast as [a gang associate] often just because of how you look and where you are.”
This month, the California Department of Justice is expected to release newly proposed standards for how law enforcement can use CalGang, the result of legislation passed in 2017 after a state audit determined the database was filled with errors and lacked accountability.
Law enforcement officials contend that CalGang is an important tool that works well and that being on it doesn’t cause harm because it is so closely guarded. Police say that they are careful about who is added and that the database can be used only for investigations, not to screen people for employment or immigration status, or to fish for criminal activity.
“It doesn’t mean you can go out and pop somebody just because they are in CalGang,” said Wes McBride, a former gang deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who created the precursor to CalGang in the 1980s. “It’s an investigative tool, a clue.”
But much of the criticism of CalGang is that it remains a vehicle for racial profiling and that it is too easy to be added to it and too difficult to be removed. More than 90% of the nearly 90,000 people in the database in 2018 were men of color, predominantly Latino and black, according to data from the California Department of Justice.
Brian Allen was giving an old friend a ride in 2017 when he was pulled over by LAPD in South Los Angeles. Months later, he ended up on CalGang, the statewide database of suspected gang members, even though he is not a gang member. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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On Monday, Mayor Richard Thomas discussed how staff at JP Morgan & Chase summoned the police on him, his staff member, and a Mount Vernon Police detective as the Mayor sought to deposit a six figure check and get access to the City’s online banking records.
A Chase employee called the police on Wednesday, April 25, after Mayor Thomas was invited into a conference room and after Mayor Thomas had introduced the two people with him, including the police detective.
The response by the White Plains Police Department was resolved amicably after one of the responding officers recognized the Mount Vernon Police detective.
Mayor Thomas believes that race certainly played a role in the Chase employees calling the police. The two staffers who accompanied Mayor Thomas are black and Hispanic.
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T.I. paid tribute to his late sister Precious’ legacy with a scholarship fund in her name to help students with the cost of college.
The Atlanta rap mogul announced the Precious Chapman Scholarship Fund during the recent taping of VH1’s annual tribute show, Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mama.” The initiative will reward $25,000 to an eligible student.
Precious, born Antoinette Chapman, passed away at age 66 after a horrific car accident in February 2019. She was a single mother and helped her brother and his wife, Tiny, raise their eight children.
“She was a single mother who worked to make life better for her children and everyone else that she encountered,” T.I. said of his sister’s legacy. “In the spirit of that, we have partnered with VH1 to award a deserving student a scholarship in my sister’s name.”
At the VH1 event, he surprised Tierani Scott by announcing that she would be the first recipient of the scholarship.
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White drug users addicted to heroin, fentanyl and other opioids have had near exclusive access to buprenorphine, a drug that curbs the craving for opioids and reduces the chance of a fatal overdose. That's according to a study out Wednesday from the University of Michigan. It appears in JAMA Psychiatry.
Researchers reviewed two national surveys of physician-reported prescriptions. Between 2012 and 2015, as overdose deaths surged in many states, so did the number of visits during which a doctor or nurse practitioner prescribed buprenorphine, often referred to by its brand name, Suboxone. The researchers assessed 13.4 million medical encounters involving the drug but found no increase in prescriptions written for African Americans and other minorities.
"White populations are almost 35 times as likely to have a buprenorphine-related visit than black Americans," says Dr. Pooja Lagisetty, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and the study's corresponding author.
The dominant use of buprenorphine to treat whites occurred at the same time opioid overdose deaths were rising faster for blacks than for whites.
"This epidemic over the last few years has been framed by many as largely a white epidemic, but we know now that's not true," Lagisetty says.
What is true, Lagisetty added, is that most of the white patients either paid cash (40%) or relied on private insurance (35%) to fund their buprenorphine treatment. The fact that just 25% of the visits were paid for through Medicaid and Medicare "does highlight that many of these visits could be very costly for persons of low income," Lagisetty says.
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