Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Walter McAfee (1914-1995) was born in Ore City, Texas, and attended public schools in Marshall, Texas, where he graduated high school with honors. He enrolled in Wiley College (Texas) where, in 1934, he graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. In 1937 he earned a Master of Science in Physics from Ohio State University. McAfee earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1949.
During World War II, Walter McAfee was a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corp Engineering Laboratories. There he distinguished himself in electromagnetism and radar. He was a member of the Project Diana team that was responsible for the first lunar radar echo experiments in 1946. The goal of Project Diana was to determine if a high frequency radio signal, could penetrate the outer atmosphere of the earth.
The solution was to send a radar signal to the moon and bounce it back to earth. For this they needed an accurate computation of the velocity of a position on the moon relative to a position on the earth. Dr. McAfee performed the calculations, and on Jan. 10, 1946, the experiment was successfully conducted. Unfortunately, McAfee's contributions to Project Diana (even his name) were not mentioned in news reports about the experiment.
In 1956, President Eisenhower presented McAfee with one of the first Secretary of the Army Research and Study Fellowships, which he used for post-doctoral studies in radio astronomy and ionospherics at Harvard University. With colleagues Felix Lavicka and Ockle Johnson, he analyzed data collected during high altitude nuclear explosions over the Pacific in 1959-60, and they showed for the first time that such explosions could cause communication black-outs. McAfee held a number of research and supervisory positions in the areas of wave propagation, passive sensing, target acquisition, and battlefield surveillance up to his 1985 retirement. He also taught courses in atomic and nuclear physics and in solid state electronics at Monmouth University from 1958 to 1975. He maintained membership in AAS throughout these changing responsibilities and interests. (Read more here)
Dr. Walter McAfee was a scientific adviser to the U.S. Arm Electronics Research and Development Command. For 42 years he worked for the government at New Jersey''s Fort Monmouth including service as director of a NATO study on surveillance and target acquisition. He was also a scientific adviser to the U.S. Arm Electronics Research and Development Command. He concurrently lectured in atomic and nuclear physic and solid state electronics at Monmouth College from 1958 to 1975.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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D.C. police officers will no longer handcuff children 12 and younger, except in situations deemed dangerous to the child or the public, due to a new guideline designed to improve how police engage with juvenile suspects, Chief Peter Newsham said.
Police officials began to revamp departmental policies with the D.C. attorney general’s office in April in response to an incident involving an officer captured on video * chasing down and detaining a 9-year-old boy, whom police handcuffed but later determined committed no crime. That incident came weeks after police handcuffed a 10-year-old boy in a case in which Attorney General Karl A. Racine later said the child was “totally innocent.”
Racine launched a probe into the encounter and joined police officials to review current general orders for officers and training methods to recommend changes
“We just want to handle our juveniles in the most professional way,” Newsham said in an interview. “You have to have an understanding that these kids aren’t fully developed emotionally and mentally
[i added the video link because the story sanitizes the story. The 9-year-old child is being handcuffed while the surrounding crowd looks on horrified and pleads with them to “get off”. The child cries and then pees his pants, because he is NINE YEARS OLD! — dopper0189]
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The NYPD has found another way to harass people of color: jaywalking tickets.
Police don’t write a lot of them, but between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30 last year, cops issued 316 summonses for walking against a traffic light, or crossing mid-block, and 284 of them — or 89.5 percent of the tickets — went to blacks or Hispanics, according to the city’s own summons data, crunched by Streetsblog. Only 55 percent of the city’s population is black and/or Hispanic.
More than half of the tickets — 167, or 53 percent — were issued to people under 25, with 44 percent of the tickets going to people aged 18 to 25, even though that group comprises just 7 percent of the population.
Advocates for basic equity in the administration of justice were appalled by Streetsblog’s findings.
“This is a disgusting and indefensible statistic,” said Anthony Posada, the supervising attorney of the Community Justice Unit at The Legal Aid Society. “This speaks volumes to how NYPD officers choose to spend their time and what orders they receive from their superiors, and the mere fact that the NYPD still spends resources on enforcing jaywalking is mystifying. It makes clear that the overall agenda of the institution is to keep communities of color in check at all times.”
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The national conversation around voting rights is deeply skewed. Republican lawmakers and operatives openly endorse disenfranchisement; they brag when their attacks on suffrage succeed; and they work feverishly to rig redistricting in favor of white people. But all too often, judges refuse to acknowledge the racism of voter suppression laws, dancing around the purpose of these measures. Only rarely will a court admit what every reasonable observer should already know: The disproportionate impact of these laws on minority voters is no coincidence; it is exactly what legislators intended.
It is refreshing, then, that on Monday the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not tiptoe around the bald facts: Arizona Republicans’ recent crackdown on voting rights was motivated by racism. The court invalidated a law that was plainly designed to stop Native American, Hispanic, and black voters from casting a ballot—not just because it happened to burden minorities more than whites, but because it is flat-out racist.
Arizona’s “long history of race-based voting discrimination,” combined with legislators’ “false, race-based” claims of voter fraud “unmistakably reveal” an intent to discriminate on the basis of race, the 9th Circuit announced.
The Supreme Court’s conservative justices may well reverse the ruling. But the 9th Circuit will at least force SCOTUS to confront the reality that white supremacy remains a driving force in Republicans’ assault on the franchise, despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ declaration that racism is a historical relic.
Monday’s decision in Democratic National Committee v. Hobbs involves two Arizona regulations: a ban on out-of-precinct voting (the “OOP policy”) and a restriction on volunteers’ collection of early ballots. In most of Arizona, voters are required to cast a ballot at a specific polling place within their precinct. If voters go to the wrong precinct, they can cast a provisional ballot. But election officials then throw this ballot away, even if the voter was otherwise eligible to vote. From 2008 to 2016, Arizona discarded 38,335 OOP ballots cast by registered voters, exponentially more than any other state. Voters’ assigned polling places change constantly, even month to month, and those assignments can be suspiciously inconvenient. Some polling places are located at the very edge of a precinct, and many citizens live closer to a different polling place within their precinct—at which they nonetheless are forbidden to vote.
This system places a heavy burden on people of color. In 2016, for example, the rate of OOP voting in Pima County was 150 percent higher for Hispanics, 80 percent higher for blacks, and 74 percent higher for Native Americans than for white voters. Across the state, racial minorities voted OOP at twice the rate of whites.
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A new study breaks down the ubiquitous television cop drama and America's strange obsession with police. The New Republic: Bingeing on Cop Propaganda
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Watching cop shows always requires a certain suspension of disbelief: the detective who, armed with a few vague details, sifts through tens of thousands of records in a matter of seconds to pinpoint a single car to her team. The bartender who remembers every person she’s ever served a drink. The fact that virtually every case is even solved in the first place.
By now, it’s become a running joke. But beyond the familiar tropes, every episode of Law & Order: SVU or NCIS mindlessly consumed after work or on a weekend afternoon is also a vehicle for a particular understanding of law enforcement: a police-know-best mind-set that takes all of the mess and violence of our criminal legal system and packages it for tidy consumption. Given the ubiquity of these shows, it’s jarring to consider the scale of it.
A new study by Color of Change and the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, “Normalizing Injustice: The Dangerous Misrepresentations That Define Television’s Scripted Crime Genre,” sought to quantify the impact of this mass representation of law enforcement on television. Reviewing 353 episodes from 26 different shows focused on crime from the 2017–18 season, the study provides a fascinatingly detailed look at the ways the creative forces behind these shows are essentially functioning as propagandists for American cops.
Television didn’t start the trend of white Americans’ obsession with the supposed valor of the police, but it is one of the more powerful means of transmitting and reinscribing it to the nation: More crime shows cracked the top 100 watched programs than any other genre, and Color of Change found that in the fall 2019 lineup, 21 of the 34 prime-time dramas broadcast on the four main networks were about law enforcement.
There’s a wealth of information in the report, but among the more intriguing facets is its breakdown of how these shows justify police misconduct. Whereas people accused of crimes are rarely granted the necessary screen time for the audience to develop empathy with them or an understanding of the social and political contexts they’re coming from, the opposite is true for the cops: They are the central characters in these shows, and there’s nothing but room to explore their inner lives, whether as the now-saturated role of the anti-hero or the otherwise good cop making one bad decision.
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When Vanessa Nakate addressed a tweet to the Associated Press asking why she had been cropped out of a photo, it was out of curiosity. She didn’t think her question would ignite a firestorm of criticism and spark an international conversation on erasure and diversity within the environmental movement.
“When I saw the photo, I only saw part of my jacket. I was not on the list of participants. None of my comments from the press conference were included,” she said. “It was like I wasn’t even there.”
The 23-year-old Ugandan activist had appeared at a joint press conference in Davos, Switzerland, with other prominent climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer, and Isabelle Axelsson.
But when the news agency published a picture of the event, Nakate had been cut from the image—which showed only the four white activists.
Speaking up catapulted Nakate into an unfamiliar territory of social activism: calling out anti-black discrimination and racism. After experiencing “the definition of the word” for the first time in her life, she received messages of support. She said she now felt a greater responsibility to “amplify their voices.”
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Allies of Donald Trump have begun holding events in black communities where organizers lavish praise on the president as they hand out tens of thousands of dollars to lucky attendees.
The first giveaway took place last month in Cleveland, where recipients whose winning tickets were drawn from a bin landed cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes. A second giveaway scheduled for this month in Virginia has been postponed, and more are said to be in the works.
The tour comes as Trump’s campaign has been investing its own money to make inroads with black voters and erode Democrats’ overwhelming advantage with them. But the cash giveaways are organized under the auspices of an outside charity, the Urban Revitalization Coalition, permitting donors to remain anonymous and make tax-deductible contributions.
The organizers say the events are run by the book and intended to promote economic development in inner cities. But the group behind the cash giveaways is registered as a 501(c)3 charitable organization. One leading legal expert on nonprofit law said the arrangement raises questions about the group’s tax-exempt status, because it does not appear to be vetting the recipients of its money for legitimate charitable need.
"Charities are required to spend their money on charitable and educational activities,” said Marcus Owens, a former director of the Exempt Organizations Division at the Internal Revenue Service who is now in private practice at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “It's not immediately clear to me how simply giving money away to people at an event is a charitable act.”
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But around 2016, I found myself back in the middle of the 1960s, hunting for an answer to a technology question. That is when I confronted the fact that I didn’t know as much about the civil rights movement as I had thought.
The 1960s—that was the explosive decade when the computer revolution and the civil rights revolution collided, catapulting us toward our current moment. But I also discovered that in the 1960s, our civil rights forebears, not the computer wizards, were the ones highlighting the challenges such innovation would bring. Those civil rights figures provided a blueprint for not just their own technology future in the 1960s, but our own future that we must confront now.
Many of the computer scientists and engineers of the day seemed indifferent to the civil rights movement. However, three civil rights figures—the philosopher, the planner, and the visionary—were keenly aware of, were concerned about, and directly addressed the growing revolution in computing and automation.
A. Philip Randolph was a labor leader. But when it came to the subject of automation and technology, he was our chief ethicist. Randolph never shied away from a good fight, but he thought it foolish to resist technology’s progress. “You cannot destroy the machine. You cannot stifle the invention of various geniuses in the world,” he once said. Still, Randolph outlined key principles that should govern technology’s design and use. To Randolph, technology wasn’t just the domain of technical experts or privileged classes. Technology, he asserted, was the “collective creation of the people.” As such, he believed “the people should share in the fruits of technology.”
As the longtime head of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph was primarily concerned that automation would displace Black workers. But he was no Luddite. He simply believed that public interest should govern and guide technology. He stressed that “the community and the government have a responsibility” to see that technology produced public goods.
In that vision, Randolph gave us a model for technology governance. But it was Bayard Rustin—architect of the famed March on Washington—who developed a plan. Rustin knew that automation’s employment threat was merely a symptom of a more deeply rooted problem: America’s antipathy toward Blackness. Rustin knew that negative consequences caused by automation would hurt Black people first and hardest. But it was precisely this certainty that led Rustin to see a way forward—through planning.
Rustin was aware of not just automation, but cybernation (a term used in the 1960s to refer to both computerized automation and that era’s concept of “artificial intelligence”). Automation referred to computers carrying out industrial processes. Cybernation emphasized a sense that computers could “learn”—and therefore get “smarter.” Rustin realized that we needed to educate and prepare people socially, emotionally, and vocationally for the latter rather than the former, such that Black people would “keep up” with the computer. But Rustin also knew that this was a difficult proposition. He knew that racial discrimination in employment was real and rampant. But he believed we faced a more fundamental problem.
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