Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Thomas Mensah was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1950. His father, J.K. Mensah, was a businessman who shipped cocoa products to chocolate manufacturers in France. Thomas was an exceptionally bright child, learning to read newspapers at an early age and becoming fluent in French. As a child, he often conversed in French with his father's business associates. He went on to twice win the National Competition in France in 1968 and 1970.
Thomas received his early education at the exclusive Adisadel College boys school in Cape Coast. An excellent student, particularly in science and math, he received a scholarship to study chemical engineering at the University of Science and Technology Kumasi, Ghana. An honors student, he graduated in 1974 and was awarded a fellowship from the French government to study Chemical Engineering at the University of Science and Technology in Montpelier, France (USTL). While enrolled at USTL, he took part in a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a certificate in Modeling and Simulation of Chemical Processes from the university in 1977. A year later, he graduated from USTL with a PhD.
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In 1980, Thomas travelled to the United States where he took a job with Air Product and Chemicals in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was a research engineer in the chemical group division. One of his projects was to observe the mixing process in the Polyvinyl Alcohol Process Improvement Division. The process included injecting PVAC ( a polymer having a high resistance to to flow) with a catalyst. Inside of a thin film reactor which used a moving blade system. The resulting mixture would end up on a moving belt where it would cure into a white slab of Polyvinyl Alcohol, later cut into smaller pieces. A problem occurred when the mixture was of poor quality, as the resulting polyvinyl acetate did not cure properly, resulting in an usable product (and often causing a shutdown of the manufacturing process.
Mensah, after long research and an innovative use of high-tech video equipment was able to determine that when the centers of the vortices during the mixture process often trapped poorly mixed reactants , allowing them to proceed onto the moving belt. Thomas solved this by altering the blade configuration in the mixing process (as well as altering the notch depth). This redesign of the high speed thin film industrial mixers produced a much purer blend, thus improving the efficiency of the process and diminishing the delays which often shut down the manufacturing plant. He was rewarded by winning second prize in a prestigious research competition.
In 1983 he joined Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York as an engineer. He was brought on to help solve efficiency problems in the Corning Fiber Optic manufacturing process. Fiber optics refers to the design and application of optical fiber. Optical fibers refers to glass or plastic fiber through which light travels, usually carrying information. Fiber optics wires (or cables) are more efficient conductors of communication material than metal wire. Unfortunately, at that time it was difficult to increase the production of fiber optical material because the delicate glass fibers would break very easily if the production speed was increased. Thus, in the drawing and coating phase, the process was limited to producing only two meters per second of fiber optic stand....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Just in case you didn't realize it but local news media’s intense focus on violent crime is deeply racialized. Color Lines: How News Media Fuels the Myth of Black Crime.
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The local news media’s intense focus on violent crime is also deeply racialized, at least if New York City’s media market is indicative of national trends.
Media Matters reviewed the 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. broadcasts of four New York-area stations over the course of this summer and compared their crime stories to arrest data from the New York Police Department. In a report released Aug. 26, the watchdog group found black suspects in crime stories far outweigh their actual representation in arrests—which is saying something, since we also know arrests themselves are racially skewed, with black people representing far more arrests for, say, marijuana possession than drug-use rates suggest is appropriate.
The disparity in crime coverage was most striking for stories about theft. In local news-land, 80 percent of suspects in New York-area thefts are black, Media Matters found. In real life, blacks represent 55 percent of NYPD’s arrests for theft. For assaults, TV-land sees 72 percent of suspects as black. Real life: 49 percent.
This reality skewing coverage is part of how black bodies become synonymous with crime and danger—and helps justify the violence and danger the state then reigns down upon peolpe like Michael Brown and Eric Garner. But the news media’s skewed racial reality doesn’t end with crime.
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I've seen many false dawns of diversity over the years, let's hope this one sticks. The New Republic: Primetime TV Is More Diverse Than It's Ever Been. Why Now?
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Black-ish” and “Cristela,” which explicitly address race, ethnicity, and assimilation, stand out in a fall season that’s the most diverse in recent TV history. They’ll be joined later this year by “Fresh off the Boat,” a ’90s-set sitcom about a Taiwanese-American family moving to uber-white Orlando. In “Selfie,” Korean-American John Cho plays the romantic male lead in an ill-conceived Pygmalion update, while Viola Davis is a leather-clad law professor in “How to Get Away with Murder” (which also caps off a full night of Shonda Rhimes-produced dramas). And that’s just ABC.
It may be strange to call “shows about non-white people” a trend, and, yes, the TV landscape is still far more monochromatic than the America it broadcasts to. It was only six years ago when the networks announced a fall lineup without a single new series led by an actor of color—unless you count “The Cleveland Show,” a cartoon with an animated black dad voiced by a white guy. It hasn’t entirely been for lack of trying; the networks have had diversity divisions in place for years, since the NAACP first called them out in 1999. The result: stigmatized “diversity hires” in the writers’ rooms, and the addition of a “black best friend” to ensemble casts. What has changed now isn’t TV executives’ commitment to multicultural ideals. They’ve just finally realized that diversity is good business.
In fact, shows with more diverse casts have larger audiences, according to recent research from UCLA’s Bunche Center for African American Studies. (Median ratings were highest for shows with casts that were 40 to 50 percent minority, and lowest for shows with casts that were less than 10 percent minority.) Though we don’t know the audience demographics for all the shows included in the study, these ratings aren’t only because of minority viewers; shows like “Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy” are popular with lots of different people. Still, black viewers watch 37 percent more television than the U.S. average, according to Nielsen—a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by advertisers.
But TV fans excited about Anthony Anderson and Viola Davis on their screens this fall also have a struggling and fractured industry to thank. As networks hemorrhage viewers, they have found they can no longer ignore even a small slice of viewers. Between Netflix, Hulu, and hundreds of cable channels, there has never been more to watch on TV, and more ways to watch it. Back when a show like “Everybody Loves Raymond” could reliably get an audience in the tens of millions, the network strategy was to aim broad. Shows that targeted an under-served portion of the potential audience—teenagers, kids, black viewers—migrated first to upstart networks like UPN and the WB, and then finally to cable. But broadcast ratings are now under half of what they were a decade ago, and continue to drop from 10 to 15 percent a year, making the networks appreciate even niche audiences.
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If you've never experienced AfroPunk Fest, you're missing out on one of the largest gatherings of creative, colorful and conscious-minded individuals. New York Times: Afropunks, Come as You Are.
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If navigating the complexities of teenage years wasn’t confusing enough, I never quite knew exactly where I fit in. I began to discover British punk bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols and would often be the only black girl at local punk shows. Still going to the school cafeteria gave me anxiety attacks.
“You can say what you want around her. Whitney’s only kind of black, she won’t mind,” a white friend used to joke when I joined her friends.
But I did mind. What did kind of black even mean? To avoid confusion, I just skipped lunch.
While I was going hungry, a young filmmaker was traveling across America asking many of these exact questions. Growing up mixed-race on the punk scene in Southern California, James Spooner said he experienced a confusing racial divide when he attended punk shows.
“You would go to shows and it was blatantly white power, swastikas, all of that,” he said in a MTV interview.
In 2003, he released a documentary, “Afro-Punk,” speaking with black punk artists and fans about their everyday lives — a missing voice that he felt wasn’t being heard in mainstream media. He moved to New York and partnered with a former music manager, Matthew Morgan, to create what they called “the other black experience.” The two held social events and after-parties for the film screening, booking black alternative bands to play for mostly minority audiences. Later, an online chat forum brought together a global following of people who identified with this alternative – and often overlooked – culture.
“We usually see one side of the black experience, which isn’t always positive,” said Mr. Morgan, who now manages Afropunk productions with his partner and girlfriend, Jocelyn Cooper. “Afropunk is putting 360 degrees of ourselves out there.”
I was a senior in college when I stumbled on the Afropunk community while browsing the Internet. The forums were endless — people were sharing new music and having discussions about the evolving state of black identity. In time, the conversations began to include skateboarders, comedians and people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. When I graduated, I moved to New York and began to interview alternative bands and artists of color to share on the site.
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During the 60's political struggle for racial equality artists were mounting their own insurgency to help change the way people perceived the world around them. Union Leader: Exhibit serves as 'Witness' to Civil Rights Movement, marks half-century since landmark legislation passed.
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Fifty years ago, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The bill then came before the U.S. Senate, survived a 54-day filibuster, and was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Marking that journey, is “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” an exhibit of more than 100 works by 66 artists who merged creative expression with political activism. The exhibition, organized by the Brooklyn Museum, explores how painting, sculpture, graphic art and photography not only reflected the political and social turmoil of the era but also helped to influence its direction. “Witness” will be on view at the Hood from Saturday through Dec. 14, and will be accompanied by lectures and other museum programming and a smartphone-based audio tour.
TRYING TIMES: Jacob Lawrence’s 1962 piece “Soldiers and Students” is part of an exhibit opening Saturday at Hanover’s Hood Museum of Art. More than 100 works reflect how artists merged creative expression with political activism, both mirroring and influencing the course of the Civil Rights Movement, curators said.
“Visitors will be able to explore ... the many ways that people make a difference to themselves, their communities and the world by taking action,” said Michael Taylor, director of the Hood Museum of Art.
No clear and contemporary road map existed for political activism in the arts at the outset of the 1960s, curators said. The established artists of the Cold War generation— primarily abstractionists who saw their work as profoundly subjective and self-contained — rejected the validity of art that was socially or politically activist. A significant number of artists, driven by their inseparable convictions, nevertheless tapped a wide array of aesthetic approaches to produce art in support of the cause of racial equality.
Barkley L. Hendricks titled his 1969 oil and gold leaf piece "Lawdy Mama."
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.