Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Rick Antonius Kittles (born in Sylvania, Georgia, United States) is an African-American biologist specializing in human genetics. He achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via the DNA testing of the remains found in old grave sites.
Kittles grew up in Central Islip, New York. He holds a B.S. degree in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1989), where he pledged Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, and a Ph.D. in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (1998). He is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.
In 1990 he began his career as a teacher in several New York and Washington, D.C. area high schools. From approximately 1995 until 1999, Rick worked as a researcher with the New York African Burial Ground Project (NYABGP), a federally funded project in New York City. Howard University researchers, led by anthropologist Michael Blakey, exhumed the remains of 408 African Americans from an 18th-century graveyard; Kittles gathered DNA samples from the remains and compared them with samples from a DNA database to determine from where in Africa the individuals buried in the graveyard had come.
Beginning in 1998, as he was completing his Ph.D. at George Washington University, Kittles was hired as an assistant professor of microbiology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Kittles was also named director of the African American Hereditary Prostate Cancer (AAHPC) Study Network at the university's National Human Genome Center. Kittles co-directed the molecular genetics unit of Howard University's National Human Genome Center. He served in these positions until 2004. Beginning in 2004, he served as an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology & Medical Genetics at the Tzagournis Medical Research Facility of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.]
Kittles is currently the leader of the Washington, D.C.-based African Ancestry Inc., a genetic testing service for determining individuals' African ancestry, which he co-founded with Gina Paige in February 2003. He also serves as an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Kittles has published on genetic variation and prostate cancer genetics of African Americans. In addition, he discovered, through a DNA analysis, he descends mainly of people of Dakar, Senegal, and Nigeria's Hausa people.
Kittles was featured in the tow BBC films Motherland: A Genetic Journey and Motherland – Moving On (released in 2003 and 2004, respectively), as well as in part 4 of the 2006 PBS series African American Lives (hosted by Henry Louis Gates). On October 7, 2007, he was featured on the TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes. In February 2008 he appeared in part 4 of African American Lives.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Many Americans will find on their November 2024 ballot a space to vote for an important office: local sheriff. While there are exceptions, sheriffs have a long history of using their power to maintain a particular, unequal balance of power in society, often along racial and class lines.
A recent example of this arose on Sept. 13, 2024, when Bruce Zuchowski, sheriff of Portage County, Ohio, posted a message on a Facebook page headed by a graphic that included his official portrait and which was labeled with his official title. Zuchowski called for the public to write down the addresses of people who have campaign signs supporting Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in their yards.
That way, he said, when immigrants arrive and need housing, “We’ll already have the addresses of the … families … who supported their arrival.”
The post, which Zuchowski later claimed appeared on his “personal Facebook page,” used derogatory terms for immigrants and for Harris. It also included screenshots of two Fox News stories about migrants in Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, which are both places that former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and his running mate JD Vance have falsely claimed to be sites of dangerous activity by immigrants.
Sheriffs in the U.S. don’t often get national news attention, but Zuchowski’s request was covered in The Washington Post, NBC News and The Guardian, among others.
There are more than 3,000 sheriffs elected at the county level in the United States, each of whom has authority and autonomy to both set and enforce law enforcement policy. For example, sheriffs in many states can decide whether their deputies will wear body cameras and what happens to the footage recorded during routine stops.
In our book, “The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States,” we provide a comprehensive look at this office and detail the history of sheriffs enforcing inequality both by using formal powers of their office, such as cooperating with federal immigration officers, and with informal powers, such as communicating about who belongs in their community.
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Mark Robinson, the embattled Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, wrote many troubling things during his days as a poster on the porn forum Nude Africa. But one Robinson comment sticks out as especially confusing: “I’m a black NAZI!”
The notion of a Black man expressing fealty to a movement premised on his inferiority feels absurd, a Chappelle’s Show sketch come to life. Yet the absurdity points to something real. As strange as it seems, there’s a disturbing number of Black and Latino Americans who hold extreme right beliefs.
Two of the most prominent antisemitic voices in the country today, Kanye West and Candace Owens, are Black Trump supporters. Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, is of Mexican descent. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the January 6 riot, is Afro-Cuban. Mauricio Garcia, a Hispanic mass shooter who killed eight people at a Dallas-area shopping center in 2023, had posted neo-Nazi rhetoric on his social media pages before his attack.
Academic research suggests these are not merely a handful of cherry-picked examples. There are non-trivial numbers of right-wing Black and Latino people who express extreme right-wing ideas — up to and including outright bigotry.
In 2022, two academics — Eitan Hirsh and Laura Royden — published the results of a massive national survey on the prevalence of antisemitic beliefs in the United States. Their study found that antisemitic attitudes were significantly more common on the right than on the left. But it also found notable racial divides between right-wingers, with Black and Latino conservatives being about 20 percentage points more likely to express antisemitic ideas than their white conservative peers.
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House Democrats attempted Wednesday to quickly censure a Republican congressman who slandered Haitian immigrants in a post he made on social media, but GOP leadership stamped out the effort.
Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana described Haitians in racist terms Wednesday afternoon, calling them “wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters” in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Higgins, a far-right lawmaker who has voiced conspiracy theories, deleted the post after Democrats confronted him on the House floor.
The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, and beyond has faced an onslaught of racist abuse after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance falsely claimed that Haitians were eating pets.
Higgins was responding to a report that a nonprofit representing the Haitian community has invoked a private-citizen right to file charges against Trump and Vance. The Haitian Bridge Alliance brought the charges over the chaos and threats experienced by Springfield, Ohio, since Trump first spread the false claims about legal immigrants there during a presidential debate.
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For doctors and nurses fighting mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the virus itself is not the only enemy. They are also facing swirling rumors' and misinformation.
The first of millions of promised doses of mpox vaccine have finally started to arrive. Now the focus is on ensuring that people who need them will take them when the vaccination campaign begins next month, and teaching wider communities how to protect themselves.
Conspiracy theories spreading across the country include the suggestion that mpox has been invented by white people in order to sterilize Congolese people with vaccines – or that it is just a money-making scheme from pharmaceutical companies. Mistrust in medical institutions and treatments is in many cases a legacy of racist colonial policies.
“You see this kind of misinformation – and it spreads [more] quickly than the normal information,” said Dr Junior Mudji, chief of research at Vanga hospital in the west of the DRC.
With about 26,000 mpox cases reported across the DRC this year, officials are working to combat myths, teach people how to prevent infection and where to seek treatment, and lay the groundwork for vaccine acceptance.
The immunisation campaign is likely to be highly targeted and initially offered to frontline health workers and other groups particularly at risk, including contacts of known cases. Information on prevention and self-care, however, including the importance of regular hand-washing, needs to reach everyone.
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