Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Dr. Alexa Canady-Davis was the first Woman and first African American to become a Neurosurgeon in America. From Lansing Michigan, Alexa Irene Canady is the daughter of Elizabeth Hortense (Golden) Canady and Clinton Canady Jr. Her father was a graduate of the School of Dentistry of Meharry Medical College, practicing in Lansing. Her mother was a graduate of Fiasco University was active for years in civic affairs of Lansing. She also served as national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
Young Canady and her brother grew up outside Lansing and were the only two Black students in the entire school. Despite the obstacles, Canady was an exceptional student and named a National Achievement Scholar in 1967. She attended the University of Michigan, getting her BS, degree in 1971. After this came the University of Michigan, Medical School, and her M.D. cum laude in 1975. Canady’s Interned at Yale’s New Hane Hospital from 1975 to 1976, and an example of her non-recognition due to being Black and a woman came on her first day of her residency at Yale New Hane Hospital. She was appointed as first female and first black to a residency in neurosurgery. As she began making her rounds a hospital administrator referred to her as "the new equal-opportunity package." Despite the remark, Dr. Canady viewed her accomplishment as a double achievement for herself and both women and African Americans.
From there she went to the University of Minnesota in neurosurgery, from 1976 to 1981. She also worked at the University of Pennsylvania Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Ped Neurosurg from 1981-82. Currently, Canady is the director of neurosurgery at Children's Hospital in Detroit and a clinical associate professor at Wayne State University. Her Areas of Expertise are Craniofacial Abnormalities, Epilepsy, Hydrocephalus, Pediatric Neurosurgery, and Tumors of Spinal Cord and Brain. She has also added to special research topics such as assisting in the development of neuroendoscopic equipment, evaluating programmable pressure change valves in hydrocephalus, head injury, hydrocephalus and shunts, neuroendoscopy, and pregnancy complications of shunts......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Stop and frisk may be ending in NYC, but many cities copied this tactic, and it remains in force, including by the police in Trayvon Martin's Hometown. Fusion: MIAMI GARDENS POLICE RECORDS REVEAL BROAD POLICY OF STOPPING AND QUESTIONING CITIZENS. 8,489 KIDS, AND 1,775 SENIOR CITIZENS CAUGHT UP IN CITY’S VERSION OF "STOP & FRISK”.
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In the summer of 2010, a young black man was stopped and questioned by police on the streets of Miami Gardens, Florida. According to the report filled out by the officer, he was "wearing gray sweatpants, a red hoodie and black gloves” giving the police "just cause” to question him. In the report, he was labeled a "suspicious person.”
He was an 11-year-old boy on his way to football practice.
A Fusion investigation has found that he was just one of 56,922 people who were stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens Police Department (MGPD) between 2008 and 2013. That’s the equivalent of more than half of the city’s population.
Not one of them was arrested.
It was all part of the city’s sweeping "stop and frisk” style policy that may be unparalleled in the nation.
According to a review of 99,980 "field contact” reports, they were stopped, written up and often identified as "suspicious” -- but just like the 11-year-old boy -- the encounter was recorded in a public database, and they were let go.
Screen shot of Miami Garden's police website
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Democrats have yet to counteract the Republicans’ voter-ID narrative—or their polling—even though most African Americans oppose new voter-ID laws when they catch on to what they are. The Root: Why Democrats Are Losing the Voter-ID Message War.
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oter-ID laws must not be all that bad if black folks like them, right?
That’s the new political wolf ticket that the Republican rank and file want you to buy. Conservative activists, as jumpy as So You Think You Can Dance contestants, have hit the media trail with their latest talking point: Black folks heart voter ID, courtesy of freshly baked polling numbers, courtesy of Fox News—the king of unapologetically biased networks.
Per Fox, 51 percent of African Americans are down with voter ID when they’re asked: “Supporters of these laws say they are necessary to stop ineligible people from voting illegally. Opponents say these laws are unnecessary and mostly discourage legal voters from voting. What do you think?”
And Republicans are, predictably, elated with the results, produced by this feat of leading questions and survey chicanery. Polls, after all, validate political narratives—if you word your question right, folks will tell you the sky is red. Flacks use them to raise money and win elections.
Polls won’t, however, point you in the direction of that other poll showing that way fewer whites feel the Voting Rights Act is necessary. Nor will they show the North Carolina PPP poll (pdf) that showed 72 percent of African Americans strongly oppose voter-ID laws—in a state that’s 25 percent black.
The Fox poll offers a dangerously legit-looking way to give mostly Republican state legislators ammunition for an amazingly misleading “we told you so” on voter ID. The message, beyond the numbers, suggests there’s nothing wrong with rigging, complicating and corrupting a relatively decent voting system that’s precariously fragile from years of abuse.
Voters prepare to cast their ballots at the North Miami Public Library on Nov. 1, 2012, after standing in line in North Miami, Fla.
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
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Glimmers of hope in stopping one root cause of African conflicts. Slate: The Conflict Minerals Reports Are Trickling in, and They Show Progress.
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You wouldn't want anything sinister lurking in your smartphone. But the tin, gold, and other potential "conflict minerals" in there could have a checkered past if they were smelted in a war-torn country. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act requires that companies who use conflict minerals in the manufacturing of their products submit reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission about where the metals came from. And the deadline for those reports is June 2. Time to see how everyone is doing.
Apple had already disclosed some conflict mineral information in a larger Supplier Responsibility Report earlier this year. But the company's recent SEC filing goes into more specific detail. In 2013, Apple used 205 smelters, 21 of which got metals from the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country whose economy has been complicated and obscured by civil war. Four of the 21 DRC smelters have not yet been verified by third-party auditors as conflict-free.
Other companies have already submitted reports about their suppliers of the four conflict minerals, which are tin, gold, tantalum, and tungsten. HP reports that of 201 smelters it could identify in its supply chain, 60 are accredited. HP took steps to evaluate the other smelters and encourage them to improve their compliance, but in 2014 they will be continuing to "further mitigate risk and improve due diligence."
Conflict minerals could be in any of the electronics you use.
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♫ Butterflies in the sky... ♫ Color Lines: LeVar Burton Raises More Than $1.7 Million to Bring Back ‘Reading Rainbow’.
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LeVar Burton, the actor and longtime host of the beloved children’s edutainment show “Reading Rainbow,” is on a mission to bring the show back for new audiences. Burton has launched a Kickstarter campaign to take the show’s library online, and he’s raised more than $1.7 million (and counting) online in less than 24 hours. It’s incredible. And if that wasn’t enough, the campaign’s got an infographic that details the problem of childhood illiteracy in the U.S.
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If Google is serious about diversity, the best thing it can do next is to ask for help. The Root: Why Google Should Call Some Black Friends.
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oogle just did something few tech companies have shown interest in doing: It seriously confronted the issue of diversity—or, rather, its lack thereof.
The company issued a report on its workforce diversity, and let’s just say, if it had wanted to, the report could have been summarized as follows: “When it comes to Latino and black employees, we have almost no diversity.” At the moment, 2 percent of Google’s workforce is black, despite black Americans making up 13 percent of the population. Hispanics are just 3 percent of its workforce, despite being nearly 17 percent of the population.
To its credit, Google not only commissioned the report—something it did not have to do—but also shared the results, something it also did not have to do.
“We’ve always been reluctant,” said Senior Vice President Laszlo Bock, “to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.”
Outside Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
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This is an important historical fact largely forgotten. Slate: It Wasn’t Abortion That Formed the Religious Right. It Was Support for Segregation.
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The modern religious right formed, practically overnight, as a rapid response to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that's how the story goes. The reality, Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor writing for Politico Magazine, says, is actually a little less savory to 21st century Americans: The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn't Roe v. Wade that woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from "segregation academies"—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.
As Balmer shows, feelings about Roe v. Wade were mixed in the conservative Christian community in the early 1970s, with quite a few evangelical leaders agreeing with the court that abortion is a private matter. Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced. Balmer writes:
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: "religious freedom."
Jerry Falwell got his start fighting for segregation.
Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images
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Figures don't lie, liars can do figures.... The Root: Think You Know the Dropout Rates for Black Males? You’re Probably Wrong.
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n Bladensburg Road along the border of Prince George’s County, Md., and Washington, D.C., a billboard reads, “57% of District of Columbia students drop out.” The billboard is large and imposing, with an orange backdrop and bold diagonal dashes on each side to mimic a road-hazard sign. Many would find the content of the sign to be consistent with the frequently cited report “The Urgency of Now: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males,” by the Schott Foundation, which states that Washington, D.C., has a graduation rate of 38 percent for black males.
To be blunt, the message on the billboard is a lie, and technically, the percentage of students who drop out has only a little to do with the percentage that graduates. Yes, this is counterintuitive, but I will explain more later.
The high school dropout rate in D.C. is less than 10 percent for all students, and 14 percent for black males (pdf). The Schott Foundation’s observation that the graduation rate for black males is 38 percent is accurate. However, since most people do not know the difference between the graduation rate and the dropout rate, the report is misrepresented far more than it is accurately presented. Anyone doing an analysis of demographic trends in the D.C. metro area understands that any measure of cohort graduation rates will be influenced by the outmigration of black people from the city core.
Across the nation, most parents of schoolchildren are bombarded with dropout and graduation statistics that are very upsetting. The numbers as typically presented imply that either the public school system is woefully inadequate in meeting the educational needs of black students or black students have incredible problems adjusting to a normal school environment.
Billboard in Prince George’s County, Md.
IVORY TOLDSON
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