Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
When you plug your printer, keyboard or monitor into your PC, the majority of the time you'll find, happily, that it simply works, no matter what brand your peripherals are or how long ago you purchased them.
This is largely because of the developments of inventors Mark E. Dean and Dennis L. Moeller, who developed the internal architecture of what's know as the ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) systems bus at IBM in the early 1980s.
Mark Dean was born on March 2, 1957, in Jefferson City, Tenn. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee in 1979, followed by a master's degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 1982. He later went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, in 1992. He began working for IBM in 1980.
Dennis L. Moeller was born on April 28, 1950, in St. Louis, Mo. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri. In 1974, he joined IBM's semiconductor manufacturing team, and later moved onto IBM's Series 1 mini-computer printer project.
The pair began working together on a team tasked with building a microcomputer system with bus connectivity for peripheral processing devices for IBM computers and compatible PCs. A bus is a device that connects a computer's central processing unit with devices such as keyboards, mice, monitors, printers and the like. A bus allows the devices to communicate with one another, making it possible for devices to work together efficiently and at high speeds.
Dean and Moeller made architectural improvements within the PC and the bus that laid the foundation for explosive growth in the computing industry. Their invention, for which they received U.S. Patent No. 4,528,626 in 1985, made it possible for users to connect computers to peripherals by simply plugging them in.
IBM first brought the concept to market in 1984 with its PC/AT computer. An augmented version of the ISA bus remains standard within most PCs to this day. Dean and Moeller were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their invention in 1997..… Read more here
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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400 years after the forced arrival of 20 Africans in what would become the United States, hundreds of descendants traveled from Jamestown Virginia to the Jamestown district of Accra, Ghana. Color Lines: Descendants of Enslaved Visit Ghana to Memorialize Kidnapped Ancestors
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This week marks 400 years since some 20* enslaved Africans were brought to what would become the United States. In commemoration of that difficult history, more than 200 Black people embarked on the Jamestown to Jamestown pilgrimage, making the journey from Jamestown, Virginia, to the Jamestown district of Accra, Ghana.
Organized by the NAACP and The Adinkra Group, the trip lets participants retrace the steps of their ancestors. They land in Accra on Tuesday (August 20) and stay there until they head to Cape Coast Castle on Friday (August 23).
In the video below, NAACP leaders talk about why they had to plan this pilgrimage. “We would not exist but for this journey we call the transatlantic movement,” said NAACP president Derrick Johnson. “We are here in our Sankofa moment so that we can go back and get the knowledge necessary to prepare us for the fight that’s in front of us.”
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With ADS idiots all over Twitter, Ebony decided to reprint he issues explored in this November 2016 article which are just as relevant today. Ebony: Who Gets to Be African-American? An Academic Question
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During this year’s presidential campaign, there was no shortage of conversation around race and voting, and political pundits often generalized about groups of voters, reducing, say, all Black, Latino or female voters into a single shared mindset.
Such generalization is not only inaccurate, but it also excludes important dialogue within and around communities.
After all, who gets to be African-American? In the winter of 2004, as the first African-American woman at Macalester College to receive tenure, I was asked by some of my Black students to attend a discussion about life as an African-American student on a majority-white campus. What ensued instead was wholly unexpected—and preoccupies me to this day as a full professor at Northwestern University, who writes, lectures and publishes extensively on Black identities in the U.S and Europe.
Instead of sharing and then bonding over experiences of bigotry, the students began to discuss the ways they felt estranged from one another. The first student to speak had been born in Nigeria but raised in the United States and felt she was sometimes viewed as “not really” African-American. Another student responded that the “Nigerian-American” student enjoyed the distinct advantage of having two parents who “shared a common culture.” She, by contrast, had to contend with a mother from the Caribbean and a father who was West African—which meant endless discussions and debates around the dinner table about Blackness—but a Blackness that did not tally with the expressions, views and cultural knowledge enjoyed by her “African-American” classmates from kindergarten on up.
Finally having a space in which they could talk about differences in Blackness, their confessions and reflections continued until the time came for them to return to their dorms to study.
This classroom conversation proved to be a microcosm of themes addressed in my book “Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” which explores the different ways Black Africans, African- Americans, Black Caribbeans and Black Europeans express and analyze their racial identity.
We also certainly see these narratives around our first African-American president, who has a Kenyan father and a White American mother who may be partially descended from African-American slaves, which would make Obama the embodiment of differences within African-American identity.
More Black Africans have immigrated to the United States since 1970 than had been forcibly brought over as slaves in three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet even today, in our most pressing debate and crisis on Blackness in the United States—Black Lives Matter—we tend to focus almost wholly on those African-Americans who identify as descended from slaves. Yet the almost 6 million Black Africans and Black Caribbeans in the United States (who have grown by over 137 percent in the past decade), also suffer from police violence. Simply put, all Black lives should matter.
This issue of equal representation pursues me into the campus classroom where I teach African-American literature and culture. Every year, I am further struck by how many of my students are “African-American”—but “not like me.” They have parents from different African nations, the Caribbean, Europe, South American and Asia, yet I struggle to find and teach literary and scholarly texts that reflect their nuanced and complex histories, lives and cultures.
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The country’s vaccinators have overcome distrust, misinformation, and an insurgency to reach this point, but they can’t stop yet. Foreign Policy: Nigeria Just Won a Complex Victory Over Polio
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KANO, Nigeria—Addau Saidu weaved his motorbike between lanes crowded with bright yellow kekes, the three-wheeled cabs that ferry people back and forth across northern Nigeria’s megalopolis.He tracked the road’s center line on his silver bike, wearing a blue and black striped football jersey, completely unruffled by the afternoon rush. Heembraced it: “If a place is not Kano, it’s automatically seen as the bush—that’s what we say here.
”Off the bike, he has to be more deliberate about his movements. When Saidu wants to walk, he places the rubber soles of a flip-flop over each palmand uses his arms. Polio took his legs, which are rail thin and often crossed beneath him when he isn’t driving.“
Because of the bike, I feel I am able because I have movement,” he said in an interview in July. “I thank God for the life I am living, but I am not comfortable.” Saidu is working with UNICEF on Nigeria’s polio eradication campaign. “I want to tell the world that they should immunize their kids—especially in this area.”
Kano, known as a hub for traders, scholars, and Islamic tradition on the edges of the Sahel, has also been at the center of a three-decade,multi billion-dollar initiative to eradicate polio—an infectious disease caused by a paralytic virus for which there is no cure. It’s the largest global health intervention ever attempted.
Nigeria is officially one of three countries, alongside Afghanistan and Pakistan, where polio is still a threat—a full 19 years after the first deadline set by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate it.
It has been a difficult fight. “Kano used to be an epicenter for polio,” said Bashir Abba, a doctor who coordinates WHO’s anti-polio programming in Kano state. “Now, we are days away from 60 months without a wild polio virus,” he added, referring to the virus’s original form rather than modified versions that have been weakened for use in vaccines.
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The color and flair of traditional ceremonies give brides and grooms a way to express a vibrant cultural heritage. Nigeria: The Fabric of Nigerian Weddings
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Dola Fatunbi Olutoye, 25, was ecstatic after becoming engaged last November to Dr. Yinka Olutoye, 26. She knew she wanted a traditional Nigerian wedding, but needed help executing the cultural elements of the ceremony, which took place on May 25 in Houston.
Mrs. Olutoye, a pharmacy student from Houston, and Dr. Olutoye, a recent medical school graduate, are both Nigerian-Americans who are part of the Yoruba ethnic group, which is heavily concentrated in the Southwest region of Nigeria.
On the top of her to-do list, after graduating from pharmacy school and starting a residency program, was to shop for traditional fabrics, which have become emblematic of Nigerian weddings today.
“Nigerian weddings are full of color, vibrant, and are flashy,” said Mrs. Olutoye, who has attended many traditional Nigerian weddings in her hometown. “Without your fabrics, you’re not having a traditional Nigerian wedding.”
In Houston and throughout other Nigerian enclaves, like Atlanta, New York and Baltimore, Nigerian wedding ceremonies are especially opulent. Guest lists can number in the hundreds — a cultural holdover from Nigeria, where significant life events were typically community gatherings open to close relatives and loose acquaintances. With such a big audience, a bride aims to impart regality, vibrancy and thoughtfulness in each of her bridal looks.
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Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans. The New Republic: The New American Homeless
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Last August, Cokethia Goodman returned home from work to discover a typed letter from her landlord in the mailbox. She felt a familiar panic as she began to read it. For nearly a year, Goodman and her six children—two of them adopted after being abandoned at birth—had been living in a derelict but functional three-bedroom house in the historically black Peoplestown neighborhood of Atlanta. Goodman, who is 50, has a reserved, vigilant demeanor, her years trying to keep the kids out of harm’s way evident in her perpetually narrowed eyes. She saw the rental property as an answer to prayer. It was in a relatively safe area and within walking distance of the Barack and Michelle Obama Academy, the public elementary school her youngest son and daughter attended. It was also—at $950 a month, not including utilities—just barely affordable on the $9 hourly wage she earned as a full-time home health aide. Goodman had fled an abusive marriage in 2015, and she was anxious to give her family a more stable home environment. She thought they’d finally found one.
As a longtime renter, Goodman was acquainted with the capriciousness of Atlanta’s housing market. She knew how easily the house could slip away. Seeking to avoid this outcome, she ensured that her rent checks were never late and, despite her exhausting work schedule, became a stickler for cleanliness. So strong was her fear of being deemed a “difficult” tenant that she avoided requesting basic repairs. But now, reading the landlord’s terse notice, she realized that these efforts had been insufficient. When her lease expired at the end of the month, it would not be renewed. No explanation was legally required, and none was provided. “You think you did everything you’re supposed to do,” she told me, “and then this happens.”
A clue lay in the neighborhood’s accelerating transformation. Up and down her street, old, shabby dwellings—many of them, like the one she rented, casualties of the previous decade’s foreclosure crisis, purchased at rock-bottom prices by investors who had simply waited around until they appreciated in value—were being sold, gutted, and reconstructed. In retrospect, a flyer on her doorstep from Sotheby’s International Realty, offering to “pay cash, close quickly, and save you the hassle of multiple showings and cleaning/renovating/staging/pictures,” was an ominous sign. Goodman’s landlord, a doctor who runs an international nonprofit, told me recently that she didn’t renew the lease for financial reasons. “With the area taking off,” she explained, “it was the perfect time to unload the property.” When we spoke, she was preparing to sell the house.
Goodman had 30 days to relocate her family. She began scouring Trulia and Apartments.com for available rentals within her budget. Every night, she waited until the kids were asleep before retreating to the couch with her battered smartphone and a notepad. The list of possibilities remained depressingly short. She hoped to stay nearby in order to spare her children the hardship of switching schools, but she soon understood that continuing to live in this former working-class enclave—to say nothing of adjacent, more thoroughly gentrified communities like Grant Park—was out of the question. “It was like we’d been kicked out of the entire area, not just that particular house,” she said.
She expanded her search to other parts of the city, but still found nothing. One obstacle was her rental history. Atlanta has one of the highest eviction rates in the country; in 2017, 22 percent of Fulton County tenants had had eviction notices filed against them. (The number was above 40 percent in some predominantly black neighborhoods.) Goodman once fell behind on rent payments when she was younger, and most landlords and management companies wouldn’t even consider a prospective tenant with a prior eviction, especially since she couldn’t show evidence—per standard application requirements—that her income amounted to at least three times the monthly rent, or provide a co-signer whose income equaled five times the monthly rent.
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Want to improve your relationship with your banker? The answer’s easy: just move your business to a nicer part of town. Unfortunately, that’s the very real problem faced by many small businesses around the country who are located in lower-income or minority areas.
This conclusion was reached in a recent study by the Woodstock Institute, a not-for-profit research and policy organization that specializes in fair lending, wealth creation and financial systems reform. Researchers there studied small businesses in lower-income areas and communities of color in various parts of Illinois and compared them to their counterparts in higher-income and predominantly white areas.
So guess what they found? Businesses in the lower and moderate income areas received – surprise – a smaller share of bank loans than businesses in the higher-income areas. The same went for small businesses in areas with majority non-white residents.
The impact on these small businesses is significant. Many are forced to become their own banks or forced to go to online or “payday” lenders that charge outrageously high interest rates because they are unable to obtain the capital they need from traditional banks to grow their businesses.
“I’m not really able to go full throttle like I would like to with my business because of the fact that I can’t get capital,” Jemiyah Beard, a small business owner in Champaign, Illinois told the Woodstock Institute. Beard cannot obtain a traditional bank loan so her new business, Mary’s Master Cleaning Service, can bid on contracts and hire formerly incarcerated people who need jobs. She’s certainly not alone. “I’ve been my own bank. No one should have to do that,” another business owner complained.
Is this straight-up racism? Simple economics? Ignorance? I’m sure all of these are factors. But the more important thing is to discuss how to fix this. And moving to a nicer part of town isn’t – and shouldn’t be – the answer.
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Interesting political history. School segregation is on the rise. Can decades of data on thriving, integrated schools show the way forward? The New Republic: The Integration Success Stories
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On April 19, 1971, the Senate began debate on legislation that had the potential to foster meaningful integration in American schools. The bill was Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff’s baby. He thought that supposedly haphazard, so-called “de facto” segregation was a myth. Instead, he believed that all segregation was traceable to law or public policy. It was all “de jure.” He explained how governmental officials—through school attendance and districting decisions, zoning determinations, housing policies, school site selection choices and other actions—intentionally segregated the races both educationally and residentially.
Ribicoff’s conclusion has been confirmed many times, most recently by Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. But what was the solution? North, east, south, and west, residential and school segregation were deeply entrenched, the result of a dizzying array of state and local rules. Then, as now, most children attended neighborhood schools; if the neighborhoods were segregated so, too, were the schools.
Ribicoff’s bill was one of the single best policy interventions ever introduced to fight segregation. His plan was simple. In exchange for federal education money, state and local education agencies would be required to integrate their schools. But integrating a single school or even a single school district wasn’t enough. Instead, Ribicoff focused on the nation’s roughly 250 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs), where a majority of the country’s population lived. Each of these highly interdependent metropolitan regions was composed of any number of school districts, cities, towns, and counties. Under Ribicoff’s proposal, each and every school within a SMSA had to enroll a student body in which no racial minority group fell below fifty percent of its share of the SMSA population as a whole. So, if the SMSA was 30 percent minority, each school within the SMSA needed to achieve at least 15 percent minority enrollment. The carrot for meeting this goal was sizeable: between $20 billion and $25 billion dollars over a 12-year planning and implementation period. The stick was big, too. If local authorities didn’t comply with the federal mandate, they risked losing all their federal education funds—a penalty few localities would be willing to incur.
Walter Mondale strongly supported Ribicoff’s legislation and fought hard for its passage. The Minnesota senator marshaled persuasive social science evidence in defense of the bill. He pointed to social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew’s work highlighting the potential of “education parks.” The parks, with their large size (12,500 to 15,000 K-12 students), innovative programs and instruction, top-notch facilities, and multiple schools on a single campus, were modeled on the public university. Located on “neutral turf” accessible to both city and suburban students, they were expressly designed as a metropolitan solution for school segregation. At $50 million apiece, they wouldn’t be cheap. But Ribicoff’s bill provided enough money to put at least one park in every SMSA in the nation.
Mondale also cited psychologist Kenneth Clark’s conclusion that school segregation caused profound harm to black and white students. He noted the Kerner Commission’s admonition that the country was moving “toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And he relied on a 1966 study authored by sociologist James Coleman to bolster his assertion that the “racial and socio-economic composition of a classroom is an important and determining factor in educational achievement.” Mondale tried to move his colleagues with data. “Every major report and research study on the consequences of educational disadvantage has concluded that achievement and learning are greatly hindered by minority group isolation,” he told them. “Conversely, clear, positive, and lasting benefits result from education in integrated environments.” But it didn’t work. The bill was soundly defeated two days later.
Fast forward two generations. Demographically, our nation is rapidly becoming more racially heterogeneous. Yet, at the very time when the country needs diverse public education the most, America’s public schools are moving in the opposite direction. School segregation and racial isolation are increasing for all. Black and Latinx students are experiencing the worst of it.
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