Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Bessie Coleman (January 26, 1892 – April 30, 1926) was an early American civil aviator. She was the first woman of African-American descent (also the first of Native-American descent) to hold a pilot license. She earned her pilot license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921, as the first black person to earn an international pilot's license.
Bessie Coleman was born in a one-room shack in Texas in 1892. An intelligent young girl, she attended school faithfully and was active in her Baptist church – that is, when she was not needed in the cotton fields to help her large family survive (there were 13 Coleman children altogether). She worked as a laundress to save money to attend college in Oklahoma, but her money ran out after only one semester. Hoping for better things, she moved north to Chicago to stay with her older brother. Although she found life there difficult, with her work as a manicurist neither lucrative or fulfilling, she overheard and was entranced by the stories of pilots who had recently returned from the airfields of World War I. She made up her mind to be a pilot.
In 1918, except for the occasional wealthy socialite, female pilots were rare and African American female pilots were non-existent. Coleman was stonewalled by sexism and racism from American pilots who scoffed at her desire to fly. Hearing of her woes, Black newspaperman Robert Abbott, the publisher of The Chicago Defender, encouraged her to go to France to learn how to fly. He financed a trip to Paris in 1920, and for seven months, Coleman trained with some of the best pilots in Europe. Despite being the only Black person in her class, she was treated with respect and earned her international pilot’s license by 1921. When she returned to America, newspapers caught wind of the unusual story and she became a minor celebrity almost overnight.
In the early 1920s, commercial aviation was still in its infancy, so most active fliers were stunt fliers who performed at air shows. Coleman sought out the best in the field (again, in Europe) for training, and she took to the air show circuit, where she was a big hit. Nicknamed “Queen Bess,” Coleman was known for her daredevil aerial tricks, and her race and her gender became a selling point instead of a liability. For five years, she barnstormed around the country, making a good living. It was a hard living, however, filled with risks; in 1923, for instance, she ended up in the hospital with a broken leg when her plane crashed from mechanical failure.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Justice Grisby, like every other student in Holmes County School District, knew about the paddle. Long, smooth and wooden, it was kept locked away in the principal’s office, except for the occasions it was taken out and used as a weapon of punishment. Grisby, a recent high school graduate, was lucky to survive her K-12 experience without ever getting paddled, but she will never forget the time she saw it happen to someone else.
Grisby, who is Black, was in the sixth grade. It was 2014 and her class was working on a reading project. As usual, the class bully was acting out. The girl was grabbing another student’s poster board when a school administrator walked through the classroom and caught the misbehavior.
Paddlings were supposed to occur in the main office, behind closed doors. This time, it happened in front of a class of around 30 rowdy kids. The student was made to stoop over and the administrator wound up his arms, and struck her behind twice with his wooden paddle, Grisby recalled in an interview with HuffPost. The class broke out in jeers and laughter.
“You know how when you’re hurt and you laugh so people won’t see you cry?” Grisby asked, explaining the situation. “She kind of laughed, but I think she wanted to cry.”
Most states ban corporal punishment in schools. But Grisby lives in Mississippi, a state that not only allows it, but has the highest rate of the practice in the country.
For almost a century, Mississippi was one of the nation’s leaders in another category of punishment: lynching.
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Law enforcement has had a brief yet abusive relationship with American public schools, spurring the terrorization of Black and Brown students and increased interaction with law enforcement at a young age. The rationale behind police in schools has always been for the “safety” of children. Yet, since police have shown up, the school to prison pipeline has strengthened, putting young children into the legal system and criminalizing their oftentimes normal behavior.
In resistance, youth and student organizers have taken to school board meetings and the streets to fight for the removal of police from schools in line with the national call to defund the police after the death of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings.
Many youth and student organizers have been protesting against police in their schools for over a decade. Denilson Garibo, a student director on the Oakland Unified School District board and a graduating senior at Oakland High School, in Oakland, California, has been protesting for the removal of police in his school for almost two years.
Right before the school board’s vote on eliminating Oakland police from schools in March 2019, Garibo spoke at board meetings about the violence of Oakland police at Oakland High and the danger they pose to Black and Brown students. The Oakland school board still voted to keep Oakland police in their schools.
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Despite impassioned pleas from attorneys, a Texas school district is refusing to change its grooming policy that led to the suspension of two Black students earlier this year.
The students — cousins Kaden Bradford and De'Andre Arnold — wear their hair in long dreadlocks. But Barbers Hill Independent School District, just east of Houston, forbids male students from keeping their hair at a length "below the top of a t-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes," according to the district's Student Handbook.
This week the school board voted unanimously to keep the policy in place.
"Especially in this moment, coming so soon after George Floyd's death, and the largest protests in our nation's history, so many different institutions right now are examining systemic racism and implicit bias, and looking within themselves," said Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, who represents Bradford. "This was an opportunity for the school board to revise and change its policies so that it could be inclusive and affirming of all students, regardless of sex and race."
Barbers Hill ISD did not respond to a request for comment. At the board meeting Monday, an attorney for the school district said the policy had nothing to do with race, but was rather about maintaining a standard of excellence in Barbers Hill schools. That standard entails keeping one's hair short.
"They want the standards without having to meet the standards," attorney Hans Graff said, as reported by Houston Public Media. "They want to be treated differently. They're saying, 'We want the academic excellence, we want the excellence of Barbers Hill. But we don't want to comply with what it takes to achieve that.' "
But that argument itself was "racist and incredibly problematic," Klosterboer told NPR. The school district was essentially saying that "the only way to be excellent is to fit that white majority stereotype," he said. "[The students'] heritage, too, is excellent, just as the majority culture in the district itself."
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The collapse of the child care industry is hitting women of color the hardest, threatening to stoke racial and gender inequities and putting pressure on Congress to address the crisis in its new round of coronavirus aid.
Black and Latina women are suffering a double-barreled blow as coronavirus-induced shutdowns batter the industry, since they dominate the ranks of child care providers and have long struggled to gain access to the services for their own kids.
The sector, which saw 60 percent of its programs close at the height of the pandemic before rebounding slightly, is still down some 237,000 workers from last year — a number that’s likely to grow as states shut down again, economists say. Some projections show the industry could permanently lose half its programs. Two in 5 child care providers this month said they will shut for good without an infusion of federal funding.
The issue is shaping up to be a key faultline as Congress this week enters negotiations over the next round of coronavirus aid, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he hopes to clear before August recess.
If “we allow them to go under, we are jeopardizing both the incomes and wealth of that workforce,” said Melissa Boteach, a vice president at National Women’s Law Center. And "the parents who are not going to be able to go back to work or who are going to have to give up their careers or jobs for less pay — because they can’t find the child care to cover the hours that they need — are disproportionately going to be women and women of color.”
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As if the rate of COVID-19-related deaths among Black adults wasn’t alarming enough, a new study published by the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that even among healthy children, the risk of death or complications after surgery for Black children more than three times higher than that of their white peers.
Researchers used retrospective data from a previous study by the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric, that was collected from 2012 to 2017, to identify more than 172,000 children who underwent inpatient operations. They found that compared to white children, Black children’s odds of dying within 30 days after surgery was 3.43 times higher, and 18 percent higher for developing postoperative complications, and that the odds were seven percent higher for “developing serious adverse events,” according to the paper.
“We know that traditionally, African Americans have poorer health outcomes across every age strata you can look at,” Olubukola Nafiu, an anesthesiologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the paper’s lead researcher, told the Washington Post. “One of the explanations that’s usually given for that, among many, is that African American patients tend to have higher comorbidities. They tend to be sicker.”
Yet the study—described as “the first used to evaluate the impact of race on postsurgical outcomes in apparently healthy children”—found that the excuses normally given for this health parity (poverty, lack of access to health care, biological predisposition and higher preoperative comorbidity) aren’t necessarily true if the kids were healthy before undergoing surgery. So the researchers want this study to encourage medical professionals to look beyond a person’s race when offering care after surgery.
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The ever-shucking Jason Whitlock reached even further to describe this phenomenon. Somehow he defended Sage Steele and Terry Crews by creating, out of whole cloth, a subversive, anti-religious “Holy War” that sacrifices Black unity in favor of Communist principles and anti-white sentiment that will turn Black people into heathen sluts.
“The white Marxists financing and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have recruited Black worshippers to join forces with non-believers of all races in the reshaping of America,” Whitlock writes for Outkick the Coverage. “Inside the court of social media, Black Lives Matter and its appointed racial gatekeepers declared the practice of and adherence to the values taught in Christianity as crimes against Blackness. It’s a clever political strategy that provokes the abandonment of religious principles that inhibit sexual freedom and the disruption of the nuclear family.”
Here’s the thing about all of these anti-Black takes:
They are Black as fuck!
Every Black person in America has an uncle, a pastor or a barber (Maybe not McWhorter’s barber, but still…) whose ideology rests in conservative principles. Martin Luther King castigated white people and told Black people to do better. Black people know they have to do better. Most of Black Lives Matter work is in the Black community. Do you know who hates Black-onBlack crime more than white people?
Black people.
But none of that abrogates white people for creating a system that disproportionately harms Black people. These grifters’ unwillingness to denounce white supremacy louder than the calls for negro respectability is malpractice at best and a terrible con job at worst. You have to do both or you look like a damn fool. My uncle knows it. The preacher knows it. John McWhorter’s barber knows it.
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The head of the Congressional Black Caucus said there is nothing stopping incoming members who identify as both African American and Latino from joining the Black and Hispanic caucuses — an issue that’s flared up recently as a younger candidate challenged the perceived status quo.
The comments, from CBC Chair Karen Bass on Wednesday, come after Democratic candidate Ritchie Torres blasted the group in an op-ed over the weekend for seemingly denying membership to lawmakers who identify as both Black and Latino.
“Since the ‘either-or’ rule is a policy of the Congressional Black Caucus, I have a personal plea to make to my future colleagues there: Expecting Afro-Latinos like myself to be politically alienated from our own blackness — at a time when Black Lives Matter has become the rallying cry of a racially awakened nation— is the cruelest of ironies,” Torres wrote.
But during a panel on Black and brown social movements, hosted by UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative on Wednesday, Bass told POLITICO that there is no such policy.
“It’s not in our bylaws,” Bass said. “It has been a tradition mainly because it is something that we haven’t faced before. ... So, it is absolutely something we are going to take up and figure out how we deal with.”
If the CBC welcomes Torres, a candidate in New York’s 15th Congressional District, while allowing him to also maintain membership in the Hispanic Caucus, it would be a notable shift within the Democratic Caucus. While the issue of dual membership hasn’t come up often in the past, when it did arise, older Black members privately encouraged incoming lawmakers of color to pick one caucus over the other, according to several members and aides.
The openness to allowing Torres to join the CBC also illustrates the shifting dynamics within the storied 50-year caucus, where generational and ideological differences are starting to become more prominent as the group leads on efforts to fight racial injustice amid a nationwide reckoning over police brutality this summer.
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Day after day, week after week, the cars pulled up outside the Ethiopian embassy in Beirut and ejected their passengers: tired-looking black women, their modest possessions stuffed into cheap suitcases (pictured). With the economy in free fall, many Lebanese families could no longer afford to pay their domestic workers. Nor could they easily send them home. The price of repatriation flights had surged because of covid-19. So their solution was to dump the women outside their embassy. Dozens were left to fend for themselves.
The protests in America over racism and police brutality have drawn much interest in the Middle East. Some people reacted with shock, some with Schadenfreude. For others, though, America’s unrest was an opportunity to discuss the problems with race in their own countries.
Most Arab states have a black minority. Black communities in north Africa trace their roots to antiquity: the Nubians, for example, called Egypt home long before their country acquired its Arab identity. In the Levant and the Gulf many people are the descendants of slaves taken by Islamic empires, or of African Muslims who made pilgrimages east and decided to stay.
All face discrimination. Dark-skinned people are referred to with terms like abd (“slave”). Egypt’s dark-skinned former president, Anwar Sadat, was called his predecessor’s “black poodle”. Blackface is a common sight on Arabic television. In a widely shared video a black Palestinian actress, Maryam Abu Khaled, recounted the casual bigotry she encounters, such as a mother telling her daughter to get out of the sun lest she, too, turn black.
Skin color can make marriages fraught when families see it as a marker of socioeconomic status or pedigree. Discrimination exists in the workplace, too. Black Iraqis, a community with more than a thousand years of recorded history, struggle to get government jobs and are typically relegated to menial work.
The worst treatment, though, is reserved not for citizens but for migrants. In wealthy Gulf states it manifests in a tacit racial hierarchy. Fancy hotels might employ black migrants as security guards or porters. They are less common in jobs that require interaction with customers, like waiters or hairdressers. Those better-paid roles often go to lighter-skinned workers from Asian or Arab countries.
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