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.
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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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A new report from Columbia University Law School is fairly consistent with past analyses that show the racial bias in how teachers and school administrators dole out punishments to students with browner hues. Columbia Law: BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,, OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED
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In 2014, a 12-year-old girl faced expulsion and criminal charges after writing “hi” on a locker room wall of her Georgia middle school, and a Detroit honors student was suspended for her entire senior year for accidently bringing a pocketknife to a football game.
In 2013, an 8-year-old girl in Illinois was arrested for acting out, and a 16-year-old girl in Alabama who suffers from diabetes, asthma, and sleep apnea was hit with a book by her teacher after she fell asleep inclass. The student was later arrested and hospitalized due to injuries she sustained in her interaction with the police. Also in 2013, a 16-year-old in Florida was arrested when an experiment she tried on school grounds caused a small explosion, 5 and a 12-year-old girl was threatened with expulsion from an Orlando private school unless she changed the look of her natural hair.
In 2007, a 6-year-old girl was arrested in a Florida classroom for having a tantrum. Later that year, a 16-year-old girl was arrested in a California school for dropping cake on the floor and failing to pick it up to a school officer’s satisfaction.
In each of these scenarios — and in others across the country — African American girls were on the receiving end of punitive, zero-tolerance policies that subjected them to violence, arrest, suspension and/or expulsion.
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The lawyer for the rapper accused of violent crimes believes his client is a victim of racial injustice. Does he have a point? Slate Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Bobby Shmurda???
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Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Butler said, during the early days of the civil rights movement, activists pursued a strategy known as the “politics of respectability.” The idea was to illustrate the realities of systemic discrimination for policymakers and voters by showing them how it affected a few carefully chosen, perfectly sympathetic, and morally unassailable individuals. This is where we got Rosa Parks, Butler said. Though she wasn’t the first woman to refuse to give up her seat at the front of a bus, she was the most likely to win the hearts and minds of the public, and so the cause came to rest on her shoulders.
“If we think about the first phase of the civil rights movement, when activists were attacking Jim Crow and the segregated lunch counters … the leaders looked for people who were blameless victims, and they made them symbols of the movement,” Butler said. Overall, he added, “it was a fabulous success story.”
The problem for modern criminal justice reformers, Butler said—especially those focused on how the system treats violent offenders—is that the politics of respectability are nearly impossible to harness when the people you’re trying to help look less like victims and more like perpetrators. When it comes to addressing the systemic forces that cause young black kids from poor neighborhoods to join gangs, there just aren’t many “perfect victims” to choose from: almost by definition, the people most crippled by the circumstances you hope to call attention to are people who have been turned into villains. Figuring out how to overcome this problem, Butler said, represents the next phase of criminal justice reform, which so far has been focused on making the system less punitive toward nonviolent drug offenders. Now activists must “extend the critique of mass incarceration and race disparities from the war on drugs to other crimes,” and that extension, Butler said, is exactly what he sees going on in the case of Ackquille Pollard.
Listening to Ken Montgomery lay out the case for Pollard as a symbol of all the ways that American society fails its young black men, it’s tempting to dismiss his argument as little more than spin—the work of a shrewd defense lawyer doing whatever he can to make his client seem less responsible for his alleged crimes, even if that means linking him to an important social justice movement that could conceivably lose credibility by being associated with the guy from the “Hot Nigga” video. In an email, a spokeswoman for the Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s office described the case against Pollard and GS9: “This gang was involved in a murder and numerous shootings, as well as other crimes. Several shootings involved indiscriminate gunfire, including one in which an innocent bystander was seriously injured.” You don’t even have to be skeptical of Montgomery’s sincerity to think that Pollard and his friends aren’t worth defending in the same terms as Michael Brown or Eric Garner.
And yet: if reform-minded activists really do believe that growing up in places like East Flatbush and Brownsville—where, as Paul Butler put it, “structural deprivations and wretched conditions” make it much more likely that a child will get involved in drugs, gangs, and guns—then who exactly are they waiting for?
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Hundreds of people have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to help a Detroit man who says he typically walks 21 miles to get to and from work. The Grio: Donations pour in for man who walks 21 miles in work commute 5 days a week.
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The Detroit Free Press reports that James Robertson rides buses part of the way to and from his factory job in suburban Rochester Hills. But because they don’t cover the whole route, he ends up walking about eight miles before his shift starts at 2 p.m. and 13 miles more when it’s over at 10 p.m. Lately, he’s been getting occasional rides from a banker who passes him walking every day and finally asked what he was doing.
After the newspaper wrote about the 56-year-old’s situation over the weekend, multiple people started crowdfunding efforts to help him buy a car and pay for insurance. Some have offered to drive him for free and others have offered to buy or give him cars.
James Robertson, 56, walks a total of 21 miles five days a week to get to work. (Video still/Detroit Free Press)
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An interesting effort underway. ColorLines: Can ‘Black Wikipedia’ Take Off Like ‘Black Twitter’?
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This coming weekend, in honor of Black History Month, modern-day griots of black history and cultures are holding Wikipedia editing meet-ups to diversify the site’s pool of volunteer editors and add more content about the African diaspora.
There is certainly a demand: Of the more than 100 million edits made last year to Wikipedia, Ferguson protests ranked among the most edited topic. In 2013, “race and intelligence” was one of the top 10 most controversial articles—ahead of Christianity—on the English-language version of the site. And the person most likely involved not only in global edit wars over race and racism but in the daily drip of crowd-sourced Wiki knowledge is a “technically inclined white male.”
Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, calls Wikipedia a vital resource. “[Wikipedia] is for [millennials], the source of information that they go to,” Muhammad recently told Huff Post Live. “Therefore, if they are looking up Ida B. Wells and Ida B. Wells isn’t there, then Ida B. Wells doesn’t count.”
A household name to anyone with Internet access, Wikipedia, a project of the nonprofit Wikimedia, is the sixth-largest website in the world. Over the past 14 years, according to the all-things-digital site Mashable, it “has re-shaped the knowledge industry.” Who doesn’t read a Wiki entry at least once a week? Even Maira Liriano, associate chief librarian in the Schomburg’s research and reference division browses it. And that’s “usually when I discover that something is missing,” she says via e-mail.
Established articles on, say, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Langston Hughes don’t worry Liriano; “those entries get edited constantly,” she says. But in addition to those who’re simply absent, Liriano says, “I’m more concerned about lesser-known figures that get shortchanged by brief and incomplete entries, people like Lawrence D. Reddick, King’s first biographer and the second Schomburg curator, or Aaron Douglas, the leading painter of the Harlem Renaissance.”
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International Monetary Fund urges other lenders to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to take similar action to ease financial burden. The Guardian: IMF grants Ebola-hit countries $100m debt relief.
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The three countries stricken by Ebola have been granted debt relief of about $100m (£65m) by the International Monetary Fund, which has been under pressure to relieve the financial burden on Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The IMF also urged other international lenders to the countries to take similar action as it established a catastrophe containment relief trust to provide grants to countries suffering epidemics and other natural disasters.
The trust will provide the money to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea so they can pay off debt to the IMF. The IMF also offered the west African states $160m of new interest-free loans.
Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, said: “[The trust] aims at enhancing our support to the countries in Africa hit by Ebola, as well as other low-income countries that may be affected by public health disasters in the future. This is a strong example of the IMF demonstrating flexibility and innovation in responding to the needs of our global membership.”
Boots have been washed and hung out to dry to prevent the spread of Ebola in a clinic in Monrovia, Liberia. Photograph: AP
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