Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Roland Gerhard Fryer, Jr. (born June 4, 1977) is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He also maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. In January 2008, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.
Fryer is widely regarded to be one of black America and Harvard's rising stars, having published numerous economics-related papers in prominent academic journals over the past few years. The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing: Fryer's mother left when he was very young, and his father, who beat his son, was convicted of rape, effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".
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Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his father at the age of 4. Attending Lewisville High School, he starred in football and basketball, earning him an athletic scholarship from the University of Texas at Arlington. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years while holding down a full-time job. Fryer completed his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. He also conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago with economist Gary Becker. Over the past three years, Fryer has collaborated with several other academics, including Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of Freakonomics, Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, and Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard.
Upon completing a three year fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows at the end of the 2005–2006 academic year, Fryer joined Harvard's economics department as an assistant professor. In 2005, Fryer was also selected as one of the first Fletcher Foundation Fellows. Recently, Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity NYC project, which will study how students in low-performing schools respond to financial incentives.
Fryer is currently working as the CEO of the Education Innovations Laboratory.
The Economist lists Fryer as one of the top 8 young economists in the world......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Some needs in the traditional media needs to start confronting Evangelical leaders in the US whop are funding this nonsense. Colorlines: Ghana’s Growing Gay Pride Faces Now-Familiar Evangelical Backlash
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On particular midweek nights, throngs of men and women gather at a few particular clubs to dance the night away to pulsating beats, and sometimes live music. The men dance provocatively close to each other, with reckless abandon. The few women around do the same with each other. Kisses are even exchanged.
At seaside dance parties where beer and reggae flow to all and sundry, it’s no longer uncommon for men and women in Ghana’s capital city, Accra, to test the waters and try to pick up companions of the same sex. Even in conservative Ghana, it seems that gays and lesbians are taking steps out in the public domain, at least at night.
But like elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, a backlash to that new openness has erupted as well. Since late May, it has spilled out onto the radio. Hours are spent debating whether gays should be allowed to exist here. Then Ghanaians wake up to national headlines screaming that gays and lesbians are dirty and sinful and ought to be locked up.
The pattern is becoming a familiar one throughout sub-Saharan Africa. As evangelical Christianity has seen its fastest growth on the continent, gay communities have simultaneously grown more open. The parallel developments have led to a growing list of countries in which politicians and media outlets have both incited and exploited social panic around sexuality. In the late 1990s, a beleaguered Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe drew global attention as he invited violence against gay people and blamed the country’s growing troubles on the European deprivation he said they symbolized. Since then, similar moments have struck in places stretching across the continent. Most recently, Uganda has been embroiled in controversy over a proposed law that would, among other things, allow the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality. The authors of that law are closely tied to the U.S. religious right.
Now, this West African nation is having its own gay-dialogue moment and, once again, much of it has been unsavory, with religious leaders and some politicians stoking the flames.
“Gay bashing had never been a feature of the Ghanaian social landscape until, oh, I would say the last 10-15 years. And it came with the evangelical Christians,” says Nat Amartefio, 67, a historian, lifelong resident and former mayor of Accra.
“It’s these evangelicals who are looking for Satan everywhere, in everybody’s drawers, who have created this specter of an expanding gay universe. In all fairness, maybe they see things that those of us who are not involved cannot see. But they are the ones who are driving this hysteria,” Amartefio adds.
Ghana’s Daily Graphic newspaper has for months screamed frightening headlines about Accra’s gay community. Photo: Frankie Edozien
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This should have been done. Maynard Institute: White House Rejects Pardon for Black Nationalist Garvey
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"The Barack Obama administration has flatly rejected a request for a presidential pardon for Jamaica's first national hero, the Right Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey," Karyl Walker reported Sunday for the Jamaica Observer.
"Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud totalling US$25 in June 1923, and after spending two years and nine months in an Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, was deported from New Orleans, Louisiana to Jamaica on a ship."
The pardon drive was undertaken by Jamaican-born lawyer Donovan L. Parker of Hollywood, Fla., who also publicized an online petition. The petition said Garvey "was arrested by the FBI under the Hoover administration and charged with mail fraud for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. Although his sentence was eventually commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, it is now abundantly clear that Garvey did not commit any criminal acts, but as Professor Judith Stein has stated, 'his politics were on trial.' "
The Observer story continued, ". . . In a tersely worded reply to Parker's request, White House Pardon Attorney, Ronald Rodgers said such a move would be a waste of time and resources since Garvey had been dead for ages.
" 'It is the general policy of the Department of Justice that requests for posthumous pardons for federal offences not be processed for adjudication. The policy is grounded in the belief that the time of the officials involved in the clemency process is better spent on pardon and commutation requests of living persons.' "
Best known for his back-to-Africa movement and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, Garvey was also a writer, publisher and editor. One weekly, the Negro World, "was more an opinion organ than a newspaper, hitting hard for the nationalistic aims of Garvey's group, harking frequently back to Africa," Roland E. Wolseley wrote in "The Black Press, U.S.A."
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Despite a massive humanitarian effort after the 2010 earthquake, females in Haiti remain neglected, rights activists say, lacking access to care as they give birth to babies in squalid conditions, often as a result of sex in trade for food or other necessities. LA Times: In Haiti, sexual violence, healthcare neglect plague women, girls
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Despite a mammoth humanitarian-care push in the wake of the Jan. 12, 2010, quake that killed as many as 300,000 people, serious gaps exist in the healthcare that women and girls are receiving, according to a report released Tuesday by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Pregnant women reported having to give birth in alleyways or on floors; being unable to afford transportation to hospitals, and not having access to prenatal care.
Human Rights Watch also documented widespread sexual violence and "transactional sex," where women trade sex for food or other basic survival needs. Three girls, ages 14 and 15, and three women interviewed by the organization had become pregnant through rape but had been too fearful or too ashamed to seek help.
The 78-page Human Rights Watch report is entitled "Nobody Remembers Us."
"It is inconceivable that, 18 months after the quake, with so much money pledged … that women and girls are giving birth in muddy tents," Amanda Klasing, the report's main author and a fellow in the group's women's rights division, said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
Haitian women, many of them victims of sexual violence, receive sewing lessons. (Tracy Wilkinson / Los Angeles Times)
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Michael Vick has been in the news again, his name has also been in a news for a controversy he didn’t start. Colorlines: Touré Distances Himself from ESPN’s Michael Vick ‘Whiteface’ Saga
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Michael Vick has been in the news again. This week he again became one of the highest paid players in the NFL when he signed a six-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles worth $100 million. In an unprecedented move, Nike also re-endorsed Vick, something that the company has rarely done with athletes who’ve fallen so quickly out of favor with the public.
His name has also been in a news for a controversy he didn’t start.
ESPN asked cultural critic Touré to write a story for the September edition of ESPN The Magazine. In it, Toure raised some legitimate questions about the complexities of race in the United States, but quickly shut down the notion that it’s not as simple as a hypothetical question.
Touré for ESPN:
I mean, who would this white Vick be? […] When you alter his race, it’s like those Back to the Future movies where someone goes back in time, inadvertently changes one small thing about his parents’ dating history and then the person starts to disappear. If Vick had been born to white parents, you wouldn’t even be reading this right now. That Vick would have had radically different options in life compared with the Vick who grew up in the projects of Newport News, Va., where many young black men see sports as the only way out.
Still, ESPN editors titled the story “What if Michael Vick Were White?” and illustrated the story with an photoshopped picture of a white Michael Vick.
Touré went on to Twitter to express his dismay shortly after he learned of ESPN’s actions.
My essay on Vick is nowhere near as inflammatory as the pic of him in whiteface which contradicts me saying you can’t imagine him as white.
I wrote an essay about Vick & race. ESPN the mag titled it & added art without me (normal procedure). Judge me on the story not the art.
Touré was on CNN shortly after the story was published online and said the illustration was a “horrific, misguided picture of Vick in whiteface, which dismayed and disgusted me when I saw it.”
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Something going on here? NYT: At Columbia, Faith of Some in President Is Shaken
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Several Columbia University professors said this week that the recent resignations of two high-ranking black administrators have shaken their confidence in the institution’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, and reignited concerns among their colleagues about other aspects of his leadership.
Fredrick C. Harris, a professor of political science and director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, said in an interview that the resignation of the university’s provost, Claude M. Steele, in June, followed by the more acrimonious departure last week of the undergraduate dean, Michele M. Moody-Adams, were significant not just because the officials were the first African-Americans to hold those key positions, but also because their authority appeared to wither during their tenures.
Dr. Harris said that he wrote to Mr. Bollinger this week to explain how the departures “have shaken my confidence — as well as the confidence of many others at Columbia — in the ability of Columbia to maintain diverse leadership at the top.”
June Cross, an associate professor at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism, said in an interview on Wednesday, “I’m not saying race is the issue, but it is the subtext.” She added, “Michele Moody-Adams was advertised as, ‘Here’s our commitment to diversity.’ If you’re not going to stand behind what you say you hired her to do, what does that say about your commitment?”
Such criticisms are unusual for Mr. Bollinger, who built a national reputation defending affirmative action cases at the University of Michigan, and who has brought more minority students and faculty members to Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights. In an interview Thursday, he acknowledged the criticism but said it was off base.
“While some may perceive an issue of diversity involved here in both resignations, I’m confident that that’s not either the explanation, nor is it in any way a reflection of the institution’s commitment to diversity,” Mr. Bollinger said. “It’s certainly not mine, in any event.”
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