Black Kos, Week In Review

Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

Clarence Francis Stephens (July 24, 1917 – March 5, 2018) was the ninth African-American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. He is credited with inspiring students and faculty at SUNY Potsdam to form the most successful United States undergraduate mathematics degree programs of the past century.

Clarence F. Stephens was the fifth of six children (3 girls and 3 boys) born to Sam Stephens (a chef and railroad worker) and Jeannette Morehead Stephens in Gaffney, South Carolina on July 24, 1917. Sadly, Mrs. Jeannette Stephens died during a flu epidemic when Clarence was only two years old, and Mr. Sam Stephens died when Clarence was eight. All six children went to live with their maternal grandmother who died two years after Clarence's father. The three youngest children (the boys) all went to Harbinger Institute, a boarding school in Irmo, South Carolina. They worked on the Harbinger Farm in the summer to pay for their winter schooling. In spite of the challenging beginnings, all six Stephens children went to college. Five earned baccalaureate degrees, and one sister finished a two-year college.

All three of the Stephens boys attended Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. All three majored in mathematics. One of Clarence's sister also attended JCSU. Clarence graduated from JCSU in 1938 and began graduate study in mathematics that fall at the University of Michigan. Unknown to Stephens, Joseph Pierce earned in Ph.D. in Statistics from UM in Spring 1938, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in the Mathematical Sciences from UM. The two never met. Clarence Stephens received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from UM in 1939 and 1943 respectively.

After a tour as a Teaching Specialist in the US Navy (1942-1946), he returned to the faculty of Prairie View A&M University as a professor of mathematics. In 1947, one year later, the President of Morgan State University sent Dr. Stephens an invitation to join MSU as a professor of mathematics. Dr. Stephens' focus was on being a research mathematician, so he accepted the position in part because he would be near a research library at Johns Hopkins University. While at MSU, Dr. Stephens became appalled at what a poor job was being done in general to teach and inspire students to learn mathematics. He then completely changed his focus from being a researcher to achieving excellence, with desirable results, in teaching mathematics. He remained at Morgan State until 1962.

In 1962 Professor Stephens accepted an appointment as professor of Mathematics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo. In 1969 he left Geneseo to join the mathematics faculty at SUNY at Potsdam. He served as chairman of the mathematics department at Potsdam from 1969 until his retirement in 1987. During his tenure the department became nationally known as a model of teaching excellence in mathematics. For several of these years the program was among the top producers of mathematics majors in the country. The teaching techniques that Professor Stephens introduced at Potsdam, and earlier at Morgan State, have been adopted by many mathematics departments across the country. They have been described in publications by the MAA, and recently in a book, Math Education At Its Best: The Potsdam Model, by Datta (Center for Teaching/Learning of Mathematics, 1993).

Professor Stephens discovered at a very early age that he could learn mathematics with very little help from his teachers. This ability to read mathematics with understanding, and to enjoy it for its intrinsic beauty, accounts for much of his success in becoming a mathematician. His teaching technique consists mainly of developing these abilities in students. He realized that a student who can study independently and find joy in learning and discovering new ideas, already has much of what is required for success in mathematics.

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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

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The George Floyd protests have spread to the heavily white areas of rural Ohio. Only time will tell whether the alliance will last.The New Republic: Can the White People of Small-Town America Get Behind the Movement for Black Lives?

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In rural Fairfield County, Ohio, just outside downtown Millersport, a nine-year-old boy named Elijah Monroe held up a sign on the side of the road that read, “Justice for George.” 

Millersport has a population of 1,044 people, according to Census data, and is 98 percent white. It hosts a Sweet Corn Festival every year, where tables are lined up and folks gorge on corn. The village is located on the shores of Buckeye Lake and is about five miles from the town of the same name, where the Ku Klux Klan held large summer rallies during its resurgence in the 1920s.

The sun blazed in a clear June sky. Just down the road, green wheat swayed in the hot wind. Elijah was joined by his mother, Caitlyn, and his three younger siblings, including a baby asleep and strapped to his mother’s chest. 

Elijah didn’t say much; he mostly stood there with his sign, determined. His mother said he was upset when he heard about the death of George Floyd. He wanted to join the protests. But it’s a long drive to Columbus, where all the protests were happening, with four kids. So he organized his own protest and asked his mom to post about it on Facebook.

It was the first protest that Elijah—who loves video games and fishing—had ever organized. As a matter of fact, it was the first he had ever attended. “I want them to know I’m on their side,” he told his mother. 

Most people seemed to support him. Drivers-by honked their horns and waved. A teacher who saw his invitation even showed up and stood with him for a while. But his mother told me that, after I had left, a man slowed down and started yelling at them. He said that this sort of protest was going to get them killed.

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“If all Black books were about racism, where would we be able to escape it” Slate: How Tracy Sherrod Came to Lead America’s Oldest Black Publishing Imprint

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On this week’s episode of Working, Rumaan Alam spoke with Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, the oldest U.S. publisher dedicated to multicultural voices, about her work there. Sherrod shared how she got into publishing, how she came to work at Amistad, who reads books by and about Black people, and the economics of the publishing industry. This partial transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rumaan Alam: How did you begin your career?

Tracy Sherrod: It was time to graduate from college, and my college roommate, who is a judge now, said: “What kind of job are you going to have? What are you going to do with your life?” I hadn’t even thought about that. She said: “You always have a book in your hand. Call them up and ask them for a job.” I called the Feminist Press, and they said yes. So I moved from Michigan to New York.

When I was on the phone with the Feminist Press, I didn’t want to ask how much I would be paid. I didn’t want to ask all of these questions that one should ask, because I wanted to make sure I had the job. When I got there, I found out that it was a $50 a week internship, but I would not be deterred. I got a job at Doubleday bookstore at night and worked with the Feminist Press during the day. After six weeks, I was hired permanent, full-time, which was really wonderful. Marie Brown was on the board there, and she helped me to get a job in more mainstream publishing.

I ended up at Henry Holt & Co., which was a wonderful experience, but I left Henry Holt when I went to my publisher, and I asked her to read Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, which was on submission. She told me no, she wouldn’t read it, because someone in the house had said that Sister Souljah was racist. I said, “In the past 10 years, the only people who have been called racist are people of color. I’m really concerned about that, and I’m going to resign today.” And so I did. Emily Bestler at Simon & Schuster had also been talking to me, so I called her up after my discussion with my publisher to see if the job was still available. She said yes, so I went over to Simon & Schuster and worked there for four years before moving to Amistad.

Working for Amistad had always been a dream of mine, so I feel very grateful to people like Jonathan Burnham, who hired me at Amistad to be the editorial director. It had been a dream of mine, and it’s materialized, and I love it beyond belief. Before I even started working there, years and years before, I envisioned the kind of books that I would publish. We are interested in a variety of things—we don’t only want to talk about race, that’s not all that’s going on in our lives. Although unfortunately, it definitely nags at us all day long, keeps chasing us and running us down.

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Fact: Most Southern schools were named after confederates in th 1950’s to make black students feel UNWELCOME during school INTEGRATION. The Root: Virginia Schools Are Changing Their Confederate Names Because Honoring Slavery Is No Way to Teach History

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White people want to have it both ways. They want so badly for Black people to understand that “the past is the past” and that “slavery is over,” but they also want desperately to cling to every monument and flag that celebrates institutions of oppression. They also apparently enjoy having things named for leaders of the Confederacy. Fortunately, activists who understand that immortalizing slavers and colonizers is no way to preserve history are being heard and changes are happening as a result. Now, schools across the state of Virginia are dropping their confederate names and mascots in favor of new, more progressive monikers and symbols.

The Washington Post reports that students, alumni and parents in Virginia have been successful in getting their counties and school districts to agree to long-overdue name changes for some of their schools.

The school board at Prince William County recently voted to change the names of two of their schools, both of which were named for Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.

As a result of the vote, Stonewall Middle School will have its name changed to Unity Braxton Middle School in honor of a well known Black couple from the county, Celestine and Carroll Braxton. According to WTOP News, Celestine Braxton was a civil rights activist and a Prince William County teacher for 33 years and her husband, Carroll, was one of the first Black men to enlist in the Marine Corps and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal in 2012.

The board also voted to change Stonewall Jackson High School’s name to Unity Reed High School after Arthur Reed, a “much-loved security assistant at the high school,” WTOP reports.

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Black people now make up a larger percentage of those arrested by the LAPD for marijuana offenses than before 2018. Crosstown: After pot was legalized, more Black people were arrested

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In 2017, when recreational cannabis was still illegal in California, the Los Angeles Police Department arrested 173 Black people for marijuana-related offenses. The next year, cannabis was legalized, and the LAPD arrested 239 Black people for those offenses. Last year, the number jumped again, to 261.

The climbing numbers of arrests for Black people point to a chronic failure in the way marijuana legalization has played out across Los Angeles.

In 2016, voters in California passed Prop. 64, which made recreational cannabis use legal. It went into effect on Jan. 1, 2018. The measure drew broad support, particularly from civil rights groups, which noted that Black and Latino communities had endured disproportionately higher arrest rates and stiffer sentences under drug laws. Advocates thought the new law would reverse this troubling trend.

But in the two and a half years since marijuana use was legalized, the opposite has happened. Though overall arrests for marijuana-related offenses have fallen sharply over the past decade, Black people now make up a larger percentage of those being detained.

In 2016, Black people accounted for 32.2% of all marijuana arrests in Los Angeles. Last year, that portion rose to 42.3%, according to LAPD data. Black people make up 8.9% of the city’s population.

White people, meanwhile, accounted for 20% of all marijuana arrests in 2016. Last year, they accounted for only 11.5%. Non-Hispanic white people are roughly 28.5% of the city’s population.

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Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence. Vox: What the police really believe

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Last April, a human resources manager in San Francisco’s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the city’s police force. In an exit email sent to his boss and the city’s police chief, he wrote that “the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme,” adding that “while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness, there are an equal number (if not more) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.”

Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” Individuals with high levels of this trait tend to believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be. The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality,” including “the ideology of anti-Black racism.”

This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects, even unarmed ones. Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank, has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities. Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don’t.

“If you think the social hierarchy is good, then maybe you’re more willing to use violence from the state’s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that’s your job,” he tells me.

But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one, it’s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing.

The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle. The very nature of policing, in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours, brings out the worst in people. The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers, even ones who don’t hold overtly racist beliefs, to treat Black people as more suspect and more dangerous. It’s not just the officers who are the problem; it’s the society they come from, and the things that society asks them to do.

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The “careless” piece, which appeared in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” has become a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, according to Retraction Watch. Retraction Watch: Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media

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The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.

The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.

Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:

We were careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data. This led to the misuse of our article to support the position that the probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans (MacDonald, 2019). To be clear, our work does not speak to this issue and should not be used to support such statements. We accordingly issued a correction to rectify this statement (Johnson & Cesario, 2020).

Although our data and statistical approach were valid to estimate the question we actually tested (the race of civilians fatally shot by police), given continued misuse of the article (e.g., MacDonald, 2020) we felt the right decision was to retract the article rather than publish further corrections. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original article, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

The MacDonald references are two pieces by Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, one in the City Journal and the other in the Wall Street Journal.

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Afro-Brazilians make up over half of the country’s population, but they are still fighting for their right to live. Foreign Policy: Brazil Must Address Its Own Racist Police Violence

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In countries at war, the presence of an enemy within—real or imagined—tends to increase the public’s capacity to tolerate the excesses of the state. There are 725,000 people behind bars in Brazil. In the whole world, only two countries incarcerate a larger number of their own populations: China has 1.7 million people in prison, and the United States has 2.1 million. Over 40 percent of Brazilian inmates are still awaiting trial, while only 14 percent are imprisoned for violent crimes and homicide.

Brazilian jails and prisons, overcrowded and left at the mercy of powerful drug cartels, are known in the criminal world as “universities.”

So far in Alemão, there have been 108 cases of the coronavirus, 37 deaths, and 10 recoveries. But Vasconcelos said that the actions of the police make it harder to fight the virus; as Foreign Policy has reported, accessing hospitals or getting a bed has been nearly impossible for the community’s residents. “How are we supposed to self-isolate if we don’t feel safe in our own homes? How are we supposed to avoid crowds if when police do this kind of thing and we are forced to get together to collect the bodies left behind?”

Three days after the bloodbath in Alemão, João Pedro Mattos Pinto, 14, was killed at home by police forces in São Gonçalo, a working-class city that faces Rio de Janeiro from the other side of Guanabara Bay. João Pedro had dreams of becoming a soccer star. “He always used to say: ‘Dad, one day I’ll make you proud,’” his father told The Guardian. João Pedro’s house took in more than 70 high-caliber bullets, after heavily armed police officers entered the wrong property in search of drug traffickers. In the wake of the teenager’s killing, Brazilian news outlets and online platforms held a brief discussion on race, police brutality, and the fight against drug trafficking—but for the most part it was business as usual.

Then the images of George Floyd’s killing in the United States hit the news. Brazilians of all races took to the streets to march against racism like many others around the world. It didn’t go unnoticed that it took the killing of an African American man more than 5,000 miles away for white Brazilians and mainstream media outlets to pay attention to their own homegrown race problem.

 “In Brazil, when Black people die, white Brazilians stay silent,” said Manoel Soares, one of the few Black journalists working for Globo, the country’s largest TV network. “That silence allows the media, the government, and even Black people to normalize those deaths.”

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Climate change is fueling the conflict BBC: Katsina: The motorcycle bandits terrorising northern Nigeria

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Motorcycle-riding armed bandits operating out of abandoned forest reserves are ransacking communities in Nigeria's north-west. The groups are the latest to join Nigeria's lucrative kidnap for ransom industry, and are quite brazen in their operations.

In the last decade more than 8,000 people have been killed in the states of Kebbi, Sokoto, Niger and Zamfara, according to the International Crisis Group.

But recent attacks in the president's home state of Katsina, where more than 100 people were killed in attacks between April and June, have led to protests and calls for his resignation.

On two separate occasions the bandits targeted villagers who had received food handouts from the government during the coronavirus lockdown. "They were about 200 on motorbikes, each bike rider carried a passenger and they all carried AK-47 guns," Bashir Kadisau, an eyewitness, told the BBC.

He said he climbed to the top of a tree when he saw the large number of motorcycle riders coming into Kadisau village, and saw the attackers loot shops, steal cattle and grain, and shoot people who were fleeing.

The attacks are rooted in decades-long competition over resources between ethnic Fulani herders and farming communities. The herders are mostly nomadic and can be found on major highways and streets across the country herding their cattle, but they have become involved in deadly clashes with farmers in Nigeria's north-western and central states.

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