Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America's favorite snack food. Thus, every time a person crunches into a potato chip, he or she is enjoying the delicious taste of one of the world's most famous snacks – a treat that might not exist without the contribution of black inventor George Crum.
The son of an African-American father and a Native American mother, Crum was working as the head chef in the summer of 1853 at the Moon's Lake House, a resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. At work one hot summer day in August, Crum was in his kitchen when a patron ordered a plate of French-fried potatoes. Cooked to perfection, the potatoes were delivered to the customer, who, turning his nose up, complained that the potatoes were too thick and too soft. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to rile the guest by producing French fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork. Slicing potatoes paper thin, Crum over fried them to a crisp and seasoned them with an excess of salt. Crum then gave the chips to the customer, who, to his surprise loved them.
Almost overnight, Crum's invention became widely popular. Known as Saratoga Chips, the delectably salty treats resulted in a booming business and Crum was able to open his own restaurant in Saratoga Lake in 1860 with the profits he made selling his crisps. As a tribute to the snack that got him started, Crum made sure that customers to his restaurant were greeted with basket of chips on every table. Crum's restaurant flourished and within a few years he was catering to wealthy clients including William Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Henry Hilton.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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With the Democrats taking over the House during the last election, it appears all the Congressional new blood is leading to new leadership across the board. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York will be the new Democratic Caucus leader, and Rep. Karen Bass of California will be the new chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Jeffries, 48, beat former CBC chair Rep. Barbara Lee of California in a 123-113 vote according to The Hill. At 72, Lee would have been the first black woman to be elected to the post had she won.
“I stand on the shoulders of people like Jim Clyburn … There’s a great legacy of the Congressional Black Caucus,” Jeffries said after the vote. “It’s a proud moment for our community. But I’m focused on standing up for everyone.”
Lee saw her loss as being indicative of sexism and ageism. She told reporters “You heard and saw what took place. “So I absolutely think that that’s the case.”
“And that is something that women, especially women of color and African-American women, have to fight constantly each and every day,” she added. “We still have many glass ceilings to break.”
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
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Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a racially polarizing election here Tuesday night after never fully apologizing for comments in which she suggested she would be willing to sit in the front row at a public hanging.
Then on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to confirm a judicial nominee who, as an attorney, defended a North Carolina voter identification law deemed unconstitutional by a federal appeals court because it sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The back-to-back developments this week offer a stark illustration of the state of the Republican Party and racial politics.
Five years after the GOP produced a self-examination that called for reconciliation with minority voters, the party has grown increasingly tolerant of racially divisive politics, making its support base even whiter as potential minority voters and candidates are driven away.
The shift has been led by a president who in the final days of the Mississippi Senate race said the Democratic candidate, an African American who was born here to a well-known family, doesn’t “fit in.”
The approach has provided a measure of success where, in multiple races this year, black Democrats mobilized unusually high turnouts only to be defeated by white opponents who did the same among white voters. It has produced two vastly different American electorates that both parties are struggling to grapple with ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
While some have expressed concern that the party is becoming racially desensitized in a way that produces short-term gains but risks long-term peril, there is little evidence of institutional worry. Those most concerned about the direction of the party are out of office, out of favor — or, when it comes to matters of race, just outliers.
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Yes, the state on Tuesday voted for a white racist for Senate. But liberals shouldn’t write off Mississippi as a lost cause. The New Republic: Don’t Hate Mississippi
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On Tuesday, of course, they did it again. White Mississippi voters punched their ballots in overwhelming numbers for appointed U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a casually racist mediocrity, and rejected one of the most thoroughly centrist Democratic candidates on the ballot in 2018. They chose to shame themselves all over again rather than vote for former congressman and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, a Clinton Democrat whose election would have at least complicated, if not erased, the long-held view of Mississippi as the most race-haunted and self-defeating state in the union. And they made that choice in spite of—in some cases, probably because of—another two-week dose of self-humiliation in the national spotlight, as Hyde-Smith’s neo-Confederate sympathies kept making headlines.
Espy gave them every chance to break the pattern. The consistent message of his campaign was an appeal—Espy is too mild-mannered to call it a “challenge”—to white voters to opt, at long last, for sanity and a brighter future. “Mississippi, we still just seem to be mired,” as he put it on the morning of the runoff election. “Still last on all the good lists, and at the top of all the bad lists. All the things you want to be first in, we’re lagging toward the bottom.”
In his closing ad, Espy made the stakes clear—if, that is, Hyde-Smith’s professed wishes for a front-row seat at a “public hanging” and her “joke” about the desirability of suppressing black voter turnout hadn’t already done so. “We can’t afford a senator who embarrasses us and reinforces the stereotypes we’ve worked so hard to overcome,” he said, trying to flatter white voters into crossing the rubicon for a black candidate. With the grassroots groups who fueled Doug Jones’s win in Alabama last year (and Stacey Abrams’s and Andrew Gillum’s near-misses on Nov. 6 in Georgia and Florida) producing high turnout among the black 38 percent of the state, Espy only needed about one-quarter of whites to see the light. In the end, even that was asking too much.
As the outcome became clear on Tuesday night, the ritual shaming-and-blaming began. Sure, Espy had shaved ten points off President Trump’s winning margin in the state in 2016. And yes, the new black-power voting movement in the Deep South had turned what should have been a cakewalk—Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in the state since 1982, or even come close—into an actual contest.
But none of that mattered to many members of the liberal Twitterati. Here was a prime opportunity to trot out those dismissive one-liners and “Mississippi Goddamn” references, to take another round of potshots at America’s favorite state to hate. “Mississippi,” quipped comedian Tony Posnanski, “is the person that looks at the McDonalds menu for 15 minutes that hasn’t changed for 30 years and still orders the McRacist sandwich.” Andy Lassner, co-producer of The Ellen Show, got 36,000 likes for his contribution: “Turns out it’s still 1951 in Mississippi.” An Indivisible organizer from Texas encapsulated a whole mini-genre of comments with this: “Seriously Mississippi you deserve to be at the bottom of the barrel.”
It’s amazing how 46 percent of a state can be rendered invisible by an election result. As I scrolled through the ritual Mississippi abuse, it became clear that most such comments were made by white liberal tweeters—few of whom bothered to note that it was only white Mississippi that had earned another piling-on. Atlantic writer Vann Newkirk, who delivered some of the most thoughtful dispatches from the state during the runoff, certainly noticed: “All I see is people who couldn’t give a damn about poor black folks in Mississippi and have never deemed them worthy of attention or assistance crying on Twitter about how bad Mississippi is,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Kids are going to go to bed hungry. Fathers gonna work under the whip at Parchman and mothers gonna struggle with childbirth. All under all y’all’s watch for years and years. But damn them all because a race MSNBC told you to care about didn’t go the way you wanted it to.”
Hating on Mississippi has long been a national pastime. But when the entire state is stereotyped, the largest concentration of African Americans in the county is basically erased. Author Kiese Laymon nailed the injustice of that: “When folks diss the blackest state in the nation with the richest history Black organic resistance and Black cultural work, please know they are not just hating Mississippi; they are often hating the Black folk of Mississippi who have given the world a blueprint for liberation.”
That legacy of resistance is not, as this election showed, a thing of the past, a relic of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The surprising competitiveness of this Senate election wasn’t just the result of the GOP nominating a clown to run against the classy Espy. It grew out of the progressive organizing that led the state to stop the anti-abortion “personhood” movement in its tracks by shooting down a constitutional amendment that would have outlawed birth control and in-vitro fertilization. As I noted last week, it stemmed from the efforts of Black Voters Matter, local NAACPs, and the array of new grassroots voter-engagement groups that sprung up down South in the wake of Trump’s election. It was spawned by the progressive uprising in Jackson, the state capitol, which last year elected young Chokwe Antar Lumumba mayor on a promise to turn it into “the most radical city on the planet.”
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The rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z, who has been embroiled in a legal battle over his Roc Nation clothing brand, asked a court on Wednesday to halt arbitration proceedings on the grounds that there were not enough African-American arbitrators eligible to rule on his case.
The dispute revolves around Jay-Z’s sale of his Rocawear clothing brand in 2007 for more than $200 million to Iconix Brand Group. Jay-Z later founded a new entertainment company called Roc Nation. Last year, Iconix sued Jay-Z in federal court, saying that Roc Nation’s agreement with Major League Baseball to sell New Era baseball caps with the Roc Nation paper-airplane logo violated the 2007 sale agreement.
Jay-Z countersued months later, saying the agreement applied only to Rocawear, not Roc Nation. Iconix then required Jay-Z to enter into arbitration, which it was allowed to do as part of a separate 2015 agreement.
Each side was to pick four arbitrators from the American Arbitration Association’s “Large and Complex Cases” database, with the association supplying another four. Each side would eliminate names from the list of 12 until one was agreed upon by both.
On Wednesday, Jay-Z, filing under his legal name, Shawn Carter, asked a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan to temporarily halt the arbitration or to block it permanently if the dispute over the arbitrators is not resolved.
According to the court petition, as Jay-Z began looking at the list of eligible arbitrators, he was “confronted with a stark reality: He could not identify a single African-American arbitrator on the ‘Large and Complex Cases’ roster.”
When Jay-Z expressed this to the arbitration association, the group could find only three eligible arbitrators out of about 200 who identified as African-American, two men and one woman. One of the men had a conflict of interest, leaving the rapper with just two African-Americans to choose from, which his legal team called “no choice at all.”
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Lionsgate and Common’s Freedom Road Productions have acquired the rights to Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’, the critically praised, recently discovered book by 20th century writer Zora Neale Hurston, to develop as a limited television event series.
Barracoon centers on 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Middle Passage who was brought to America in 1927. The book, which was unpublished until earlier this year, chronicles Cudjo’s time of slavery and the profound complexities of reconstruction and freedom after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished.
This is the second project coming out of Lionsgate and Freedom Road’s TV deal. Lionsgate and Freedom Road are already developing the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club TV adaptation starring and produced by Common.
Screenshots of (L to R) the cover art for "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'" and author Zora Neale Hurston, both taken from social media on November 27, 2018.
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On october 28th, the day Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election, Ana Caroline Campagnolo, an “anti-feminist” history teacher who had recently been elected a legislator in the southern state of Santa Catarina, sent out a message on Facebook. “Attention students!” she wrote. “Many doctrinaire teachers will be disconcerted or revolted” by the election of Mr Bolsonaro, a politician of the right. “Film or record all partisan manifestations that ... offend your freedom of thought or conscience,” she urged.
Ms Campagnolo’s rallying call issues from a movement called Escola sem Partido (“School without Party”, or esp). It claims that Brazil’s schools have been politicised by left-wing teachers and demands “pluralism” in the classroom. Miguel Nagib, who founded esp in 2004, contends that schools are engaged in “social engineering” that undermines the rights of parents. Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain, is an enthusiastic supporter. The movement’s critics say that its goal is not political neutrality but to instil a culturally conservative agenda that is intolerant of feminism, gay people and the left.
With Mr Bolsonaro’s election esp, which has ties to evangelical churches, has moved from the fringe to the centre. During the campaign he echoed its rhetoric, accusing the federal government of promoting “homosexuality and promiscuity” in schools. A proposed law, backed by esp, would ban teachers from talking about “gender ideology” (a catch-all term for trendy ideas about sex and gender), sexual orientation and their political views. How that will promote pluralism is unclear.
When the president-elect was reported to be on the verge of naming a respected moderate, Mozart Neves Ramos, to be his education minister, conservatives rebelled. Mr Bolsonaro retreated. On November 22nd he announced that the new education minister will be Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a Colombian theologian who has written that schools force “Marxist ideology” on their pupils.
Brazil’s biggest teachers’ union, with more than 1m members, has ties to the left-wing (but non-Marxist) Workers’ Party (pt), whose presidential candidate Mr Bolsonaro defeated. esp is obsessed with the influence of Paulo Freire, an educator who in the 1950s taught impoverished sugar-cane cutters to read. He thought teaching should draw on issues that affected learners, like hunger. His book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, published in 1968, spread that view worldwide. Brazil’s military rulers exiled him in 1964. Today, his writings are on the syllabus in most teacher-training courses in Brazil. A law designates him “the patron of Brazilian education”.
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Reggae has been added to a list of international cultural treasures which the United Nations has deemed worthy of protecting and promoting. The music, which grew out of Jamaica in the 1960s thanks to artists like Toots and the Maytals, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, was added to the collection due to its "intangible cultural heritage".
Reggae is "cerebral, socio-political, sensual and spiritual," said Unesco.
It has "penetrated all corners of the world," added a Jamaican spokesperson.
Reggae followed on from the ska and rocksteady genres - other early pioneers included Lee Scratch Perry and Prince Buster. Millie Small's 1964 ska cover of My Boy Lollipop also helped introduce reggae's laidback groove to the world.
Reggae became popular in the United States but particularly flourished in the UK, which had become home to many Jamaican immigrants since the end of World War Two.
The British reggae label Trojan, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year, introduced the world to artists like Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Bob and Marcia.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY’S PORCH
