Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Marjorie Stewart Joyner (October 24, 1896 – December 27, 1994) was an American businesswoman. She was born in 1896, in Monterey, Virginia. She was the granddaughter of a white slave owner and a slave. In 1912, she moved to Chicago and began studying cosmetology. She graduated A.B. Molar Beauty School in Chicago in 1916, the first African American to achieve this. There she met Madam C. J. Walker, an African American beauty entrepreneur, and the owner of a cosmetic empire. Always an advocate of beauty for women, Joyner went to work for her and oversaw 200 of Madame Walker's beauty schools as the national adviser. A major role was sending Walker's hair stylists door-to-door, dressed in black skirts and white blouses with black satchels containing a range of beauty products that were applied in the customer's house. Joyner taught some 15,000 stylists over her fifty-year career. She was also a leader in developing new products, such as her permanent wave machine. She helped write the first cosmetology laws for the state of Illinois, and founded both a sorority and a national association for black beauticians. Joyner was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, and helped found the National Council of Negro Women. She was an advisor to the Democratic National Committee in the 1940s, and advised several New Deal agencies trying to reach out to black women. Joyner was highly visible in the Chicago black community, as head of the Chicago Defender Charity network, and fundraiser for various schools. In 1987 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington opened an exhibit featuring Joyner's permanent wave machine and a replica of her original salon.
In 1939, she started looking for an easier way for black women to straighten their hair, taking her inspiration from a pot roast cooking with paper pins to quicken preparation time. Joyner experimented initially with these paper rods and soon designed a table that could be used to curl or straighten hair by wrapping it on rods above the person's head and then cooking them to set the hair.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Joice Mujuru, a celebrated fighter who was ousted from Robert Mugabe’s inner circle, vows to seek power on her own in the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe. New York Times: Ex-Rebel Known as ‘Spill Blood’ Takes On Mugabe.
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Joice Mujuru became a legend at 18.
Everyone in Zimbabwe knows the story of her shooting down an enemy helicopter in her country’s war of liberation. Spill Blood was her nom de guerre.
She married an even more famous freedom fighter, and the couple became political royalty after independence in 1980. She considered herself to be like a daughter of the only leader Zimbabwe has known, Robert Mugabe. She served as a vice president and was destined, it seemed, to succeed him.
But perhaps she and her husband, Solomon, were a little too eager for a succession. He was killed in 2011 in a mysterious fire that Ms. Mujuru now says was an assassination by forces loyal to the president. The president’s increasingly powerful wife, Grace, rushed to the Mujurus’ palatial estate to offer her condolences — in a way that heightened Ms. Mujuru’s suspicions.
“Instead of showing she had come to mourn, she was now busy admiring the house,” Ms. Mujuru said.
The president’s wife eventually led a purge of Ms. Mujuru from the governing party, accusing her of plotting a coup, performing witchcraft and wearing miniskirts.
“Even my own mother came to ask me, ‘When did you start practicing those things?’” Ms. Mujuru said.
Now, after staying out of the public light for more than a year, Ms. Mujuru, 60, is back, immersed in a widening political battle as the end of an era dominated by Mr. Mugabe looms over the country.
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For refugees, access to information is a matter of life and death. Here’s what one organization is doing to help. Foreign Policy: Where rumors can kill.
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When most people think of a humanitarian crisis, they imagine a population that has nowhere to live and nothing to eat. But in Greece, food and shelter, while basic, are available.
The two things that are in short supply are patience and information.
The situation exposes one of the greatest challenges of humanitarian crises today — ensuring access to relevant, accurate information that might help calm tense situations. Our organization, Internews, has been working together with myriad other groups around the world to try to fill this critical and under-appreciated gap. With all that refugees have had to navigate — smugglers, dangerous sea crossings, foreign cultures, domestic laws, international agreements — information they can trust is as vital as food, medicine and shelter.
Over the past decade, the notion of “information as a form of aid in its own right” has gained traction. The humanitarian community has come to understand the importance of listening to, talking to, and exchanging information with the people they serve. In addition to radio broadcasts, bullhorns and billboards, a mix of new information technologies from texting to apps are increasingly deployed in crisis scenarios, enabling the affected people not only to receive information, but to engage in dialogue with humanitarian responders.
These strategies are relatively easy to design and implement in “typical” crisis situations, where the affected populations share a common language and culture with each other and with the surrounding community. In such cases, local media can be mobilized to serve their information needs through radio, print, and television. Temporary radio stations can be set up in camps for the displaced, and radio receivers distributed to the population. Simple megaphones in public gathering places, clinics, and food distribution sites can help.
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Even for those with insurance, getting mental healthcare means fighting through phone tag, payment confusion, and even outright discrimination. The Atlantic: Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy.
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Last year, Decker Ngongang realized he needed to find a good therapist to help him with a lot of little stresses that were piling up.
“I grew up in a single-parent household,” he said. “A lot of the things I wanted to talk about were just childhood-related, but also the stress of being a black man in America.”
He figured it would be similar to getting someone to take a look at a knee injury. Ngongang has good insurance through his work as a consultant for NGOs in Washington. So he opened up his insurance company’s website, typed in “psychologists,” and started calling.
And calling. And calling.
Some of the therapists said they weren’t taking new patients. In some cases, he left a message and never heard back. One said Ngongang would have to wait months for an appointment. In all, he estimates he contacted more than 25 therapists.
As with any individual’s situation, it’s impossible to know exactly why Ngongang found himself stuck without an appointment. Between 30 and 50 percent of psychologists run their own practices, which allows them to largely control their own schedules, client rosters, and insurance networks. About 30 percent appear to accept no insurance at all, according to the American Psychological Association, a trade group for psychologists.
But a new study suggests there might be another problem at play when low-income and black people attempt to schedule psychotherapy appointments: They never make it past the first voicemail. The study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, suggests psychotherapists are more likely to offer appointments to middle-class white people than to middle-class African-Americans or to working-class people of any race.
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When we look back on our adolescence, it can be easy to assign a neat narrative arc—a beginning, middle, and end—to that period in our lives, as if the experiences that happened back then aren’t informing the interactions we’re having right now. The immediacy, mystery, and strange unease coursing through The Fits swats away those tidy illusions. Neither cutesy nor needlessly bleak, the debut narrative film from writer-director Anna Rose Holmer possesses a refreshingly intimate, honest tone about those developmental years, chronicling the seemingly minor travails of an eleven-year-old girl whose desire to belong opens up a door to a world from which she might not return. In Holmer’s hands, the anxiety of adolescence is a lifetime condition.
The film stars newcomer Royalty Hightower as Toni, a tween living in Cincinnati who hangs around the local boxing gym frequented by her older brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor), who appears to be the biggest influence in her young life. (It’s telling that adults are almost never seen in The Fits—in the poor African-American neighborhood where the film is set, our adolescent characters are very much on their own.) Training with Jermaine or shadowboxing on her own, Toni displays a fighter’s steely toughness and a tomboy’s ability to pass as one of the guys. And yet she often casts an eye toward the confident, muscular movements of the Lionesses, a girls’ dance squad that practices nearby. With some encouragement from her brother, Toni tries out for the Lionesses, forcing her to recondition her bruising athleticism so it can fit with the squad’s tight, frenetic choreography.
That setup might suggest that The Fits will be a crowd-pleasing sports movie in which a plucky underdog becomes an unlikely dance champion. But Holmer resists the trite narrative path. Instead, her movie is stark as a documentary but also vaguely off-kilter, as if something ominous awaits just around the corner. Toni lacks the polish of the Lionesses’ star performers—played by members of Cincinnati’s Q-Kidz Dance Team—and so her awkward learning curve is painfully visible, a physical manifestation of the insecurities rampant once hormones start wreaking havoc on young people. But even worse, just as Toni is starting to feel a little more comfortable with her new friends, a mysterious illness begins affecting the team’s leaders and older members, causing them to collapse into uncontrollable shaking fits.
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How do you get into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?
The answer is simple – and complicated.
The academy’s key mandate states that candidates must have “demonstrated exceptional achievement in the field of theatrical motion pictures.” And, while membership criteria vary among the academy’s individual branches, all potential members must be sponsored by two members from whichever of the academy’s branches — such as acting or directing — that the candidate is seeking to join. (The exception are Oscars nominees, who are automatically considered for, but not guaranteed, membership.)
But the definition of “exceptional achievement” leaves a lot open to interpretation. And the requirement that two academy members sponsor new candidates, critics say, can have the effect of favoring friends and colleagues of members — which could mean favoring whites and males, given that the 6,261 voting members are 91% white and 76% male, even after several years of talk of diversifying the organization.
So after nearly 90 years as the public face of the movie business, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finds itself at a crossroads.
Facing a firestorm for the second year in a row over the lack of Oscar nominations for any actors of color, the academy in January announced sweeping changes directed at making the overwhelmingly white and male institution more reflective of not just the film industry but the world around it. The aim: to double the number of women and minorities — currently about 1,500 and 535, respectively — in its ranks by 2020.
The Times estimates that to achieve that goal, the academy would have to invite at least 375 women and more than 130 people of color each year for the next four years. To put that in context, last year’s class of academy invitees — touted as the largest and most diverse ever — was 322 people, and the majority of them were white men.
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