Commentary: Black Scientists and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Edmond Berger is believed to originally be from what is now Togo, West Africa, the date of his birth is unknown. Berger lived as a slave in the city of CumGyauy, Bolivia. Bolivia officially abolished slavery in 1825, when it gained independence from Spain. At some point after Bolivia gained independence Berger left the country. However, slavery in Bolivia continued until 1851.
When the first internal combustion engines began to show up in the late 1700s, sparks began to fly, quite literally. The development of this type of engine became a primary focus for many interested in engineering. By the early 19th century, a variety of ignition systems had been developed, but hardly any found commercial success due to poor reliability issues.
Edmond Berger, then living in France, is credited with conceiving and then inventing the first spark plug in 1839. Unfortunately, Berger never patented his inventio
Before that, spark ignition engines typically used a moving switch (a fixed contact and a moving contact) inside the cylinder to produce a tiny low voltage spark. The Wright Brothers 1903 first flight engine used this method. Such a low voltage device does not work at high compression ratios. Higher compressions need a much greater voltage to jump the gap when a lot of air molecules (higher compression) are squeezed into the gap.
A spark plug relies on electricity to pass a spark between two electrodes, which ignites a fuel mixture inside an engine to generate power. Most modern internal combustion engines rely on spark plugs to operate. Due to the early date placed on Berger’s invention and the state of internal combustion engines at the time, his device would have been both revolutionary and rudimentary. Some believe the date to be incorrect, but nonetheless give credit to Berger for his pioneering work in the field. In 1902, Gottlob Honold, an engineer working for Robert Bosch, patented the first commercially successful spark plug based largely along the lines of Berger’s work.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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NFL Diversity ‘Rooney Rule’ for Coaches Targeted by Stephen Miller’s group America First Legal requesting a civil rights probe on the legality of a longstanding National Football League rule aimed at increasing diversity. Forbes: Ex-Trump Adviser’s Legal Group Challenges NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule’
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America First Legal, a group headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sent a letter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission targeting the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires football teams to interview minority candidates for leadership positions, in the latest example of conservative backlash to corporate policies aimed at boosting diversity.
The group asked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to open an investigation into the NFL and its “member teams” for allegedly violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The group claims the rule has “resulted in member clubs engaging in sham interviews with minority candidates solely to check the Rooney Rule box” and segregates applicants “in ways that deprive at least some individuals of interview and employment opportunities specifically because of race, color or sex.”
The letter also targets two other NFL employment programs for allegedly violating the Civil Rights Act—the “Coach & Front Office Accelerator” and “Mackie Development Program,” which provide opportunities for women and leaders of color as well as college-level officials.
In a statement to Forbes, the NFL said it’s proud of the work it’s done to promote equal employment opportunities and “the resulting growth in diversity throughout the NFL,” and the league looks forward to responding to the complaint and “demonstrating that our policies and programs are fully consistent with the law and with fundamental notions of fairness.”
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Beyond serving as an insult to her undeniable talent, Beyoncé’s treatment and the specific awards she has and hasn’t won have become emblematic of the exclusion of Black art by the music establishment. They are often cited as some of the most prominent examples that capture this problem.
As Jay-Z noted, Beyoncé has the most Grammys of any musical artist — 32 — but she’s never won the coveted Album of the Year award. AOTY is widely considered the most prestigious honor of the show, much like Best Director or Best Picture is for the Oscars, and it’s often treated like the greatest recognition that the program has on offer.
Beyoncé has been nominated for AOTY four times as a solo artist but has lost out each time. In 2010, she was nominated for I Am … Sasha Fierce, which lost to Taylor Swift’s Fearless. In 2015, she was nominated for Beyoncé, which lost to Beck’s Morning Phase. In 2017, she was nominated for Lemonade, which lost to Adele’s 25. And in 2023, she was nominated for Renaissance, which lost to Harry Styles’s Harry’s House.
In 2017, the year that Lemonade lost, Adele spoke about it explicitly in her AOTY acceptance speech and emphasized the cultural impact that Beyoncé’s record had had. “I can’t possibly accept this award. And I’m very humbled and I’m very grateful and gracious. But my artist of my life is Beyoncé. And this album to me, the Lemonade album, is just so monumental,” Adele said.
As the most important honor of the show, AOTY sends a powerful signal regarding the cultural impact that an artist has had, making Beyoncé’s longstanding exclusion from a win in that category especially significant.
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When Aurora James founded her nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge in 2020, in the wake of the reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd, she knew that the push for racial justice needed to include addressing the Black-white wealth gap. As black squares flooded social media feeds and corporations vowed to do better when it came to diversity, James saw an opportunity for companies to take real action to back up their pledges. On her Instagram account, she issued a challenge to major retailers, asking them to commit to buying 15% of their products from Black-owned businesses.
“We represent 15% of the [U.S.] population and we need to represent 15% of your shelf space,” she wrote in her post, which went viral, leading to the formal creation of the organization.
This push for financial equality and economic opportunity was informed by James’ own experiences as a small-business owner; as the creator of Brother Vellies, a luxury shoes and accessories brand that she founded in 2013 to sustainably showcase the handicraft of artisans around the world, she knew all too well that connections and access to capital—and not necessarily skills, ideas, or hard work—could determine the success of a brand. Though Brother Vellies was popular and critically acclaimed (it won a coveted CFDA award in 2015), the brand still suffered from financial strain for a period because of a troublesome business loan James took out due to the limited funds. It’s a scenario she hopes can be eliminated for other entrepreneurs with education, resources, and initiatives like the Fifteen Percent Pledge.
“I was acutely aware of the fact that talent is distributed equally but opportunity and access is not,” says James, 39. “When you don’t have ‘friends and family’ to raise money from and you’re in industries that require a lot of capital to scale, you have unique challenges, especially when you haven’t had the opportunity culturally to accrue generational wealth in this country.”
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In order to win reelection, Biden must worry less about working-class whites and more about the increasing share of Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. The New Republic: Needed - An Unprecedented Pitch to Voters of Color
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I am not saying Democrats shouldn’t compete strongly for this or any cohort of voters. Even improving their margin among white working-class voters by a few percentage points can make an important difference in a close election (and these days, they’re all close). But what I am arguing for is time and resource decisions based on reality, not romanticism. Let’s look at the data.
In 2016, according to exit polling, Democrats lost noncollege white voters by a staggering 37 points. But surely with a working-class white candidate whose roots go back to Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the top of the ticket, they made significant inroads with this important cohort in order to win, right? Wrong. On his way to winning a 51 percent majority of the vote, Joe Biden lost working-class white voters by 35 points in 2020, according to the exit polls. And in the 2022 midterms, when Democrats were able to defy history and turn back the much-predicted red wave, House Democratic candidates still lost white working-class voters by 34 points.
You don’t have to be a statistician to see the trend here. We must be clear-eyed about reality, especially in the face of Donald Trump’s success at manipulating the politics of racial grievance. It’s time to lean heavily into the changing face of the American electorate that has propelled the party’s successes and historical breakthroughs since 2008.
Democrats have been losing the white vote, and losing it badly, for decades. Jimmy Carter came close in 1976, garnering 48 percent of that vote. But ever since, Democrats have typically scored in the low 40s. That hasn’t changed. What has changed, of course, is that the electorate has become far more diverse. The real difference between Barack Obama’s majority win and John Kerry’s narrow loss in 2004, for example, wasn’t in Obama’s ability to win a significant greater percentage of white voters than Kerry. It was the well over six million more voters of color. Just looking at African American votes alone, John Kerry garnered roughly 11.8 million Black votes in 2004, while Barack Obama amassed about 16.2 million in 2008. And in 2020, Biden won roughly 17.9 million Black votes—surpassing Obama’s roughly 15.6 million in 2012. And more so than any demographic group, Hispanic voters are rapidly growing as a share of the electorate, which has been helping Democrats win. According to exit polls, in 2004 Hispanic voters made up roughly 8 percent of the electorate when Kerry narrowly lost to Bush; but in 2020, Hispanic voters made up 13 percent of the electorate, and Biden’s ability to win them by 33 points was crucial. Biden’s 2024 majority coalition will need to be built largely on the turnout and support of America’s ascending, diverse new electorate.
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When Adriana Barbosa was a child and her family was struggling to pay rent, she would sell food that her grandmother cooked to raise money. They were some of the few Afro-Brazilians in a middle-class neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, and she quickly learned that, although more than half of Brazilians have African ancestry, many of the Brazilians profiting off Black ideas do not.
This is significant considering how stark Brazil’s racial wealth gap is, even as officials have downplayed the existence of racism in their society. The average income for white workers was 74% higher than that of Black and brown workers in 2019, according to a study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Afro-Brazilian men with the same level of education as their white male colleagues made only 70% of the income.
In her 20s, Barbosa, who was always excited by everything from Spike Lee’s films to the Black Panthers’ activism, created the Feira Preta Festival, both to help pay the bills and to celebrate Black culture. The first event showcased music, plays, and literature—and drew more than 5,000 visitors. It also provided a venue for Barbosa and other entrepreneurs to sell their products.
Barbosa, now 47, was sharply aware of the lack of interest from the private sector in Black-led initiatives and wanted to change that. She therefore grew the Feira Preta Festival into a larger initiative, the PretaHub platform, which is focused on building a more equitable market for Afro Diaspora entrepreneurs. Funded by donations from Brazilian private businesses, international-development agencies, and Brazilian public-financing programs, PretaHub has invested more than $11 million Brazilian reals ($2.2 million) into assisting entrepreneurs so far, helping them scale up and digitize their operations.
Which isn’t to say it hasn’t had challenges. Funding has been an issue. A white neighborhood blocked the festival from taking place on its streets, she says. Some ticket revenue was stolen. But Barbosa has been determined to keep it all going; the festival has drawn more than 200,000 visitors over the years and has turned into one of the largest Black culture events in Latin America.
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David Oyelowo is joining forces with The Roku Channel to launch his first free, ad-supported streaming TV station, Mansa Mix.
“Mansa is dedicated to showcasing a wide array of narratives that are authentically steeped in Black culture,” Oyelowo announced in a statement, per The Wrap. “We’re thrilled to deepen our relationship with Roku with the launch of our first FAST Channel, Mansa Mix, that elevates and celebrates the richness of the culture worldwide.”
Mansa Mix provides an array of films and television shows focused on expanding the scope of Black storytelling. As an expansion of Mansa, the streaming service Oyelowo co-founded in 2021, its curated programming offers viewers authentic and diverse narratives showcasing Black culture worldwide.
“Distribution through streaming presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to start to reclaim the curation of Black culture by the creators of it for and to its global audience,” Oyelowo said, per Mansa’s website.
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