Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Dr. Stephon Alexander asks big questions. How did the space and time that govern our universe come into being? Intrigued at an early age by quantum theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, and string theory, he now works to unify them in his search for a theory of quantum gravity.
"There's a world of phenomena and theories that do very well in making cell phones work," he explains. "But at the same time, other evidence we are calling 'dark matter' is still absolutely mysterious. My discoveries come through calculations as I tease nature into revealing her secrets."
Alexander has long personal experience confronting the unknown. At age eight his family moved from Trinidad to the Bronx in New York City. "My childhood was full of surprises," he remembers. "I learned that you can't always hold on to things; it taught me the idea of embracing the unknown. Our culture tells us to try and control situations. Instead, I've always coped with unexpected events by making up theories about why they may be happening."
After earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Brown University, Alexander completed postdoctoral work at Imperial College in London and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He is now an assistant professor in the Penn State Physics Department.
During a typical day, Alexander and colleagues perform mathematical gymnastics, filling blackboards with diagrams and equations. "That interaction as we deal with a completely open slate is my favorite part," he says. "Highlights come in those moments when I've had a crazy intuitive idea ... explored all kinds of calculations and subtleties ... and then after months of work found that my hunch was absolutely correct. Those moments rarely happen, but when they do, it's amazing."
As Alexander explains, the process is intense. "You can get stuck at any stage and then it's impossible to sleep or think about anything else. For me, playing and composing music can help my mind relax, the way a muscle would relax, and allow me to think more freely."
Alexander notes many parallels between his passions for the tenor saxophone and physics. "Exploring a physics problem is like jazz improvisation—understanding the basic rules and themes lets you take off in spontaneous new directions. Music allows me to understand physics on a simpler, yet deeper level."....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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I could count on one hand how many of my childhood peers were from a two-parent household, so, as with most black kids growing up in the ’80s, my best (and only) example of a nuclear African-American family was The Cosby Show. Sure, we had classic family-oriented sitcoms like The Jeffersons, Good Times and What’s Happening?, but The Cosby Show represented something more than poverty, single parenthood or dysfunction as a backdrop—even if that was the reality for many of us.
Each week in front of a prime-time audience, Cliff and Clair Huxtable displayed how fun, loving and undeniably black co-parenting and marriage could be. The Huxtables may have been fictional, but they represented a reality that so many of us wanted to emulate. For more than two decades, this show was the primary image we had of a successful black family. To be middle class, successful and in love became the black American dream.
If you were a person of color, this was the original #RelationshipGoals.
Over the years, there have been a few notable black couples to inspire us, but it wasn’t until 2008, when Barack and Michelle Obama came on the national stage, that we had a real-life embodiment of Cliff and Clair. More recently, Steph and Ayesha Curry have emerged as another positive example of black love.
The timing couldn’t be more perfect. Over the past two years, Bill Cosby, who became known as “America’s dad” for his portrayal of Cliff Huxtable, has seen his squeaky-clean image tarnished as a result of resurfaced allegations of sexual assault by dozens of women that date back decades. This all culminated in his finally being charged in December with drugging and sexually assaulting one of his accusers.
While the outcome of an official trial still looms, the verdict in the court of public opinion has already begun to take shape. Reruns of The Cosby Show, as well as anything else Cosby-related, like his animated series Little Bill, have been pulled from the airwaves. As a result, the next generation will likely not have the same relationship with the idealistic sitcom as my peers and I had.
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A new constitution gave judicial reformers an opportunity to earn back the people’s trust. Here’s what they did with it. Foreign Policy: How Kenya Cleaned Up Its Courts.
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We found a judiciary that was designed to fail,” said Willy Mutunga, Kenya’s new chief justice, in a speech four months after his June 2011 confirmation to the post. “We found an institution so frail in its structures; so thin on resources; so low on its confidence; so deficient in integrity; so weak in its public support that to have expected it to deliver justice was to be wildly optimistic.”
Many Kenyans doubtless agreed with Mutunga’s assessment. A popular joke, “Why hire a lawyer when you can buy a judge?” summed up many Kenyans’ views of their country’s judicial system. In 2011, Kenya had only 53 judges and 330 magistrates for a population of 41.4 million. There was a massive backlog of almost 1 million cases. Litigants often bribed staff to get earlier court dates or to “lose” case files and prevent hearings altogether. In 2010, 43 percent of Kenyans who sought services from the judiciary reported paying bribes, according to Transparency International.
Few of the judges responsible for managing court stations had any training or experience in administration, and many received no on-the-job guidance. With little knowledge of how the court system worked, the public was unable to demand higher-quality services, and the judiciary itself lacked systems to track cases or to hold judges and magistrates accountable for delays.
The courts were also widely seen as politically biased. Until the passage of a new constitution in 2010, the president had unilateral power to appoint not only the chief justice of the Court of Appeal, then Kenya’s highest court, but also all the members of the Judicial Service Commission, responsible for hiring and disciplining judges.
Kenya’s disputed December 2007 presidential election threw the public’s lack of trust in the judiciary into sharp relief. The ruling Party of National Unity was declared the winner of a close race, but the opposition Orange Democratic Movement accused the government of fraud, and both national and international observers said the tallies had been manipulated. However, opposition leaders refused to settle the issue in court because they believed their party would not receive a fair hearing.
In the weeks of violence following the election, approximately 1,200 Kenyans were killed and up to 600,000 were displaced. After an international mediation process, Kenya’s major parties formed a coalition government and appointed an independent commission to draft a new constitution that would address the underlying causes of the violence — the weakness of the judiciary among them.
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A court in Zimbabwe has freed a pastor who organised a nationwide strike against the government, ruling that the police had violated his rights.
Magistrate Vakayi Chikwekwe told a packed courtroom that the decision to bring new charges in court against Pastor Evan Mawarire was unconstitutional.
“It’s my finding that the National Prosecuting Authority cannot charge the accused for [the first time in court without charges being read out to him,” Chikwekwe said.
Mawarire was originally charged with inciting violence when he was arrested on Tuesday, but prosecutors changed the charge just before his court appearance on Wednesday to more serious charges of attempting to overthrow a constitutionally elected government.
Mawarire’s lawyer protested that the change in the charges was unconstitutional and the magistrate agreed. Mawarire appeared in the packed Harare courtroom draped in the Zimbabwean flag after spending the night in police cells as officers searched his house, church and office.
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“In any type of writing program, they say to write about what you know,” John Singleton told Walter Mosley during a conversation following a 25th-anniversary screening of his classic film debut, Boyz n the Hood, in New York in June.
“When you’re a certain age, you only have a limited amount of life experience. I only knew about what I saw growing up in the hood, so I went and hung out with my folks on Vermont Avenue and decided to figure out this story. That’s where this came from—me trying to make an identity for myself as a filmmaker repping Los Angeles, and using a certain part of L.A. as an identity.”
That coming-of-age story about three teenagers—Tre, whose unmarried parents are zoned in on his success; his best friend, Ricky, a football standout; and Ricky’s drug-dealer brother, Doughboy—in South Central Los Angeles opened July 12, 1991. At the time, urban communities across the country were grappling with alarming gang violence and staggering homicide rates mainly brought on by young black men killing one another. For many, rap music was the only insight into the violence that fed news headlines. In fact, Singleton told Black Tree TV, which filmed its own anniversary tribute in early January, “The movie for me was kind of like a rap album on film. Just like the rappers were speaking out in music, that’s what I wanted to do.”
Singleton didn’t take the braggadocio approach of showing drug dealers living out Scarface and The Godfather fantasies or showing the stress that cops endure in such tough circumstances as some other films did. Boyz was different. It took audiences into the world of South Central L.A., which also produced young men like Singleton, and it was eye-opening.
“At the time, drive-bys and this horrible black-on-black crime was just everywhere, and nobody was really talking about it until John made this movie,” Stephanie Allain, the diverse voice at Columbia Pictures who championed the film she would go on to produce, tells The Root. “It basically changed the world. It changed the neighborhood. It changed the perception of the kids in the neighborhood. It changed people’s perceptions about black people in general.”
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On Tuesday, Tim Scott praised the sacrifices of police officers; on Wednesday he described the worst of seven incidents with the police, since winning public office, that had humiliated him. Washington Post: Senate’s only black Republican talks of disrespect from police.
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South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the sole black Republican in the Senate, delivered a bristling and personal speech on Wednesday in which he talked of being questioned by police simply because of his race.
“There’s a deep divide between the black community and law enforcement — a trust gap,” said Scott. “I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell, no matter their profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life.”
Scott, whose political career began 21 years ago on Charleston’s city council, joined Congress in 2010 by defeating one of former senator Strom Thurmond’s sons. He served just one term before being elevated to the Senate by Gov. Nikki Haley (R), the state’s first female and nonwhite governor. After they both endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for president, Haley joked that the future of the Republican Party “looked like a United Colors of Benetton ad.”
But Scott, the first black Republican in the Senate since the 1970s, did not leap forward to be a spokesman on race. As recently as last September, Scott defended the use of the term “All Lives Matter,” which the Black Lives Matter movement views as yet another way to diminish the threats that black people live with in America, telling CNN that “if that is somehow offensive to someone, that’s their issue, not mine.”
That heightened the drama of Scott’s Wednesday speech, the second of three he is giving in response to last week’s shootings. “The good Lord has given me a soapbox, and I’m going to use this soapbox to talk about what needs to be spoken about,” he told his hometown newspaper this week. On Tuesday, Scott praised the sacrifices of police officers; on Wednesday he described the worst of seven incidents with the police, since winning public office, that had humiliated him.
“The vast majority of time, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood, or some reason just as trivial,” said Scott. “Imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity that accompanies each of those stops.”
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