Can You Survive without Black People's Inventions?
[begin with clip from the video]
Hello and welcome back to the State of the Media podcast, this time with new and improved video effects! If you are new to the show, State of the Media is a program where I take a look at different pieces of news media, informational media, and propaganda and analyze the different ways in which the video, article, or radio broadcast is trying to manipulate a reader's opinions. Due to the fact that the potential guest whom I spoke of in my last episode has continued to ignore my invitations to talk about his strongly held political beliefs with me, I'll be picking from some low-hanging fruit today by looking at a Facebook video from Buzzfeed.
[funny clip from video?]
[title sequence/intro theme music]
[possible background music?]
For this episode, I decided to go along with a Buzzfeed video for two very big reasons: the first reason is because Facebook videos of this variety often contain much less information than a typical news article thus making it a little easier to dissect (as you might be able to tell, I was really banking on my guest to come on the show and didn't prepare a separate idea until it was too late); and the second reason is because I don't personally believe that many people fully understand the impact that a media company like Buzzfeed has on the nation's political climate and culture. A quick look at Buzzfeed's advertising page shows that they claim to have a global audience of over 650 million viewers with over nine billion content views a month. Not only that, but they claim to reach three out of five US millennials a month as well. That's the important factor to consider when understanding the power of a media company like Buzzfeed.
When it comes to social media platforms, millennials are the subjects of an ongoing long-term mental health and social health study. Millennials are the first generation to grow up with things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, instant text messages, and a whole other plethora of instant access to information and communication from their smartphones. The idea comes from the fact that checking a Facebook notification, reading a twitter response, and having posts and pictures liked and shared cause our brains to release dopamine. The release of dopamine is associated with activities that produce a form of immediate gratification as opposed to the release of serotonin which is more closely associated with activities that require sacrifice and produce long term gratification. For example, if I were to abstain from alcohol consumption for my entire life, I would be sacrificing my ability to party with friends and have a good night, but my liver would look fantastic when I'm in my forties and fifties. If I were to drink seven or eight beers every Friday and Saturday and have a drink when I get home from work and sometimes even drink on Sunday and etc. etc., I'd always be guaranteed a great time while I was drinking, but I'd probably get liver disease by the time I was forty or fifty.
Essentially, the use of social media, text messaging, and voice calling works very similarly to that of any other addictive activity, whether it be drugs, porn, gambling, videogames, or even eating unhealthy food. This is a troubling concept due to the fact that psychologists and psychiatrists never considered the fact that smart phones with these abilities could work as an addictive substance or activity when the devices first rolled out onto the market. There are even some recent studies that have suggested a correlation between the use of Facebook and the development of a brain susceptible to addictive behavior; the studies have shown that the higher a person is to identify themselves who may use Facebook a little too much in his or her spare time, the more likely their brain shows physical similarities to that of a drug addict in an MRI scan. To provide an extreme example of this concept, I want to allude to the first time I heard about the psychological impacts of Facebook, which was back in 2014 when it was revealed to the public that Facebook was running it's own secretive psychological study led by Adam D. I. Kramer. On June 29, 2014, Kramer issued a public apology on his own Facebook page for manipulating the content that appeared in an individual user's newsfeed in an attempt to see whether or not it would elicit an overall change in mood from the user. According to the New York Times;
"In an academic paper [titled Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction] published in conjunction with two university researchers, the company reported that, for one week in January 2012, it had altered the number of positive and negative posts in the news feeds of 689,003 randomly selected users to see what effect the changes had on the tone of the posts the recipients then wrote.
The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts."The point of all of what I'm saying here is that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and any other social media platform are very powerful societal and cultural tools, and they will continue to be frequent topics of discussion throughout this podcast series.
The Buzzfeed Video
To begin with our analysis of Buzzfeed's video titled People Try to Live Without Black Inventions for 72 Hours, I'm going to point out that this is a video essay. Although it is a short and relatively simple video essay, it is still an essay because the video is trying to argue a point. In fact, the brevity and brief overview of factual information is something that the video can use to its advantage. Human beings in the age of the Internet are easily distracted; our general increase of inattention has been noticed by media companies and marketing companies alike, and they have reacted by spending less on pictorial advertising and more on video-based content. If you are scrolling through your phone's facebook app or killing some time on your computer's web browser, you are almost 70% more likely to watch a video in your newsfeed than to even look at a picture for less than a half second. This is especially true if the video is relatively short, with ten minutes being a good general guideline for how long a marketer or media company should limit the length of their videos.
The argument of the video essay comes from the title, People Try to Live Without Black Inventions. The video is trying to prove the point that modern life would be nigh impossible without the contributions of Black inventors, which is not an argument that is necessarily wrong or malicious. The maliciousness comes from the lack of information (or the abundance of misinformation) to support the argument along with the demanded action that should be taken based off of the video's conclusion.
[Play an intro clip]
The video stars two girls, Kelsey Darragh and Joyce. Just to note a couple of things about the girls that I think are important, I want to go ahead and address that there is nothing that is unacceptable, grotesque, unappealing, unsettling, or what-have-you about the two. There's also nothing particularly extraordinary about them either in respect to how they are represented in context with the video. They appear solely as two girls who were invited to be the subject of this video's creator's experiment, and the two both know very little about the subject matter. They come off as random subjects that are unaffiliated with Buzzfeed (although I am sure that Buzzfeed fans might tell me something different, but I am addressing the two as I did the first time I saw the video, which is someone who is just scrolling through my newsfeed and finding myself suddenly watching this video due to Buzzfeed's targeted advertising campaigns or as the result of a Facebook friend of mine sharing or reposting the video), however both of the girls are relatively important content creators within the Buzzfeed creator hierarchy. The point that I'm making is that due to their non-flashy attire, their slurred words and child-like cadences in their speech, and the portrayed lifestyle that the two prescribe to in the video that seems to be fairly similar to that of a college student (in the sense that the two drive to coffee shops and spend most of their work typing essays in the form of news articles on their laptops), they are very relatable to millennials and college students in general. I don't think it would be unfair of me to say that if I saw these two girls in one of my college classes, I wouldn't even think to consider the fact that they were acclaimed Buzzfeed contributors, and I think that many of the people who are in college right now and are watching my video in 2018 might agree with me. Or not, I don't know.
[play clip up until the point where after the images of black inventions finishes]
The information given in the video is flashed by very quickly. The names of inventors are shown very quickly and it can be a little hard to read at times. I am willing to believe that there is a reason for this, because after I have done some research on some of the inventions that the video claims to have been made by Black people, I have discovered that a significant majority of the claims are either blatantly false or incredibly, and intentionally, misleading. Due to the nature of me trying to keep my own video short, I've gone ahead and researched the major claims that were made while Kelsey and Joyce gave us an amusing display of curiosity and surprise about how little they know about Black inventors.
The Claims
Super Soaker:
Dr. Lonnie Johnson is an inventor and engineer who holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in nuclear engineering. He has worked on the stealth bomber program with the US AirForce, he's contributed work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab by assisting with the nuclear propulsion system of Galileo's mission to Jupiter, he owns two tech companies being Excellatron Solid State, LLC and Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems (JEMS), and his company JEMS is acclaimed for developing the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter System (JTEC), a new energy production system that converts thermal energy into electricity (for use with solar power). While he was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California (NASA) as a spacecraft systems engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, he invented the idea of using a pressurized chamber to launch water. As a part time inventor, it took eight (8) years before the gun was finally introduced to consumers. In 1990, the Power Drencher (eventually renamed as the Super Soaker®) was unleashed onto the water blaster market, still in its infancy. In the interim, water gun companies such as Entertech™ and Larami ruled the water fight scene with their advances in battery powered motorized water guns.
Electret Microphone:
The video attributes the invention to James West, however it would be more accurate to say that both the Foil Electric Microphone and the Electrostatic Transducer used for said microphone was co-patented by West and Gerhard M. Sessler, a German scientist, while the two inventors were working for Bell Labs in 1962. The concept of the electret microphone had been around since the 1920s due to the need for a microphone that didn't require a strong DC bias such as a normal condenser microphone. Before 1962, electret microphones were considered to be too costly and expensive to manufacture since it required a material that could maintain a permanent static charge to remove the necessity of phantom power or a strong bias that's needed to operate a normal condenser microphone. James West and Gerhard Sessler overcame this complication together by discovering that they could use a permanently charged piece of Teflon as a dialectic component to power the microphone thus removing the necessity for phantom power (unless however if the microphone uses a preamplifier circuit). Electret is a combination of the word electric and magnet, since it uses a charged piece of metal, or in other words, an electromagnet. by the 1970s, electret microphones grew to take up at least a third of all microphones used in major recording studios, and the smaller microphones are used for telephones, hearing aids, small recording devices, and et cetera.
Personal Computer:
Mark Dean worked at IBM and was a key figure in the development of the IBM Personal Computer model 5150. He holds three out of nine of IBM's original patents including the invention of a colored monitor, a one thousand megahertz processor chip, and a system framework that allowed the IBM model 5150 communicate with external hardware and software such as printers, floppy disks, and cassette tapes. The first computer to identify itself as a "personal computer" was the Xerox Alto, but IBM is often incorrectly attributed as the inventor of the personal computer because it's revolutionary desktop model 5150 dominated the computer market until it began to decline in the 1990's. It's decline was caused by imitators copying the Model 5150's design, which they were allowed to do because the original model 5150 held no special patenting or copyrighting on its computer while 90% of the machine's software and hardware was outsourced to third-party companies.
Electrical Transistors:
Otis F. Boykin began his work with electrical transistors during the mid 1940's. In 1959, he received a patent for an improved electrical transistor that used a new arrangement of wire to reduce inductance and reactance while also making the overall product much cheaper and resistant to temperature fluctuations. His most notable invention is that of the electronic heart stimulator, or the pacemaker. He was inspired to invent the pacemaker after his mother passed away from heart failure.
Automatic Transmission/Automatic Gear Shift:
The first automatic transmission was invented by the Sturtevant brothers in 1904. With exception and reasonable application of the invention's history, all modern transmission systems can trace their lineage back to the Sturtevant brothers' original invention that was used for the "Horseless Carriages" of the time. Richard Spikes received a patent in 1932 for an improvement upon the original transmission design which created a system that allowed the gears of the transmission to seamlessly connect during a manual gear shift. Spikes patent was received around the same time in which many inventors' ideas were being conglomerated into what eventually became General Motors' Hydra-Matic transmission system in 1939, and the system debuted in the company's 1940 model Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs.
Carbon Filament:
Thomas Edison imagined a device that passed electricity through a carbon filament in an enclosed vacuum for the sole purpose of creating light. He took his imagination and realized it in the form of the light bulb. Lewis Latimer was hired by Hiram Maxim, one of Edison's top rivals at the time, to help Maxim devise a product that was based off of Edison's original invention; however, Maxim wished to specifically improve upon the issue of Edison's light bulb's longevity, as they only lasted a few days at the most. Lewis Latimer took the carbon element (which was sometimes a piece of bamboo, a piece of paper, or some other wood) and encased it in cardboard which prevented the filament from breaking after sustained use thus increasing the lifespan of the Edison light bulb by a significant margin. Modern light bulbs do not use carbon filaments, and instead they use a tungsten filament that is typically wrapped in a double coil pattern and a bulb that is filled with an inert gas such as krypton or argon as opposed to being solely in a vacuum. The first tungsten filament came from Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman who patented the idea in Hungary in 1904, however many inventors have helped improve the efficacy and longevity of the modern light bulb over the many years since its genesis by its inventor, Thomas Edison.
I understand that the process of coming up with a completely original idea is something that is not only rare and practically impossible, the video's creator had the opportunity to use Otis F. Boykin as the guy who literally invented the electronic heart stimulator, which is something they could have made a funny joke about by saying how "you like, literally can't live without a pacemaker." But instead they chose to use him as an example by saying he invented electrical transistors, which is something that he did not do. He improved upon existing designs and concepts of electrical transistors, and his improvement is something that has had a major impact on the human race's technological development; however, to claim that he invented electrical transistors and then to point at an LCD computer monitor as if that were to mean that most of technology wouldn't exist unless this specific individual was able to devise a cheaper and sturdier way to build electrical transistors is absolutely fallacious and devoid of logic or understanding of electronics. This idea is better exemplified with Lewis Latimer and his invention of an improved carbon filament (which I would like to once again emphasize the fact that he did not invent the filament, he simply improved it) being used as an example of a modern invention from a Black inventor that we could not live without; it's blatantly wrong to say that we could not live without the invention of a cardboard-encased carbon filament due to the fact that the majority of light bulbs are either incandescent (which use a tungsten filament) or fluorescent (which uses mercury, inert gasses, and phosphor powder to emit light from an electric current) with rare exception to restaurants and other establishments that want to use the much more expensive and less practical carbon filament bulbs for their vintage aesthetic.
On an opinionated note; I would go so far as to say that it's insulting to Lewis Latimer's name to pretend as if his improved carbon filament is what lights our homes to this very day or to assume that his invention is what he should be ultimately remembered for in the first place. After Latimer patented his improved filament while working for Hiram Maxim, he was then hired by Thomas Edison out of respect for his ingenuity, and then placed Latimer in charge of coordinating the construction of major electrical power plants within big cities and begin the process of lighting up every street in America. Lewis Latimer contributed a significant amount of time, energy, and ingenuity to the transition from the use of candles to the use of permanent electrical lighting fixtures in America during his life, so I don't see why the Buzzfeed video is focusing in on a patent of his that isn't really significant to today's practical applications. I don't know why Buzzfeed would try to intentionally have us all believe that Lewis Latimer invented the incandescent light bulb (which is what the video has done since the girl holds up an incandescent light bulb in the video).
Despite the enormous amount of disinformation, the two girls continue with their experiment and act as if they were living in the colonial New World. The melodramatic attention to things that were invented by Black people coupled with the misleading statements of Black inventions that are still used in modern times leads me to believe that the video is not just trying to point out instances in which a Black invention is being used in a modern context, but the video is also trying to artificially inflate the importance of Black inventors in our history. I do not know why they would want to do this.
For starters, there is no reason to provide misleading information to argue that Black inventors were and are important to our species' technological advancement, because they have and still are and will be important. There are plenty of really, really good examples of this concept, but the video's writers decided to either be lazy or to intentionally misinform their viewers. Furthermore, it should not matter in a modern context as to whether or not an inventor was Black.
[play clip of joyce saying "my cousins came through]
It doesn't mean anything if an inventor was black or white or Indian or native American or what ever race an inventor may be. The existence of black inventors doesn't change anything about Black people as a whole because an individual in the past can't control an individual in the future. Here's an example of this concept; I can trace my family's lineage back to the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that doesn't change who I am right now. Just because Sir Doyle is one of my ancestors doesn't make me any smarter or better at writing or anything at all, really. When I first leaned about how he was in my family tree, I sure thought it was pretty neat, but I didn't change at all just because I'm related to him. The more extreme example is to take this concept of family lineage and apply it to an entire race. Just because there have been a lot of white presidents in our nation's history doesn't mean that white people are any better or any worse. Just because there have been figures that share a race who've reached historical acclaim for one reason or another does not mean that the entire race in the present will share the same characteristics of that small handful (in comparison to the population of the entire race, exempli gratia 44 presidents out of approximately 224 million white people in America) of people. I don't think that this is a radical statement to make, however the video ultimately ends by claiming that we need to know this and that we need to spread and educate the video's artificially inflated and distorted view of the contributions of Black inventors.
[show clip of "so you're saying you couldn't do your work if it weren't for black people]
I guess what I'm asking is, why is this important? What is the benefit of scolding us all for not knowing that Lewis Latimer invented an improved carbon filament for the Edison Light bulb? Why is it so important to to push this idea that Black people are under-appreciated just because I didn't know that Lonnie Johnson, a world renowned nuclear engineer who helped send a spacecraft to Jupiter, invented the Super Soaker?
[play clip of girl saying she feels guilty]
Because white people should feel guilty about not appreciating the contributions made by Black inventors. Quite frankly, I'm curious to know what Kelsey means by the phrase, "I have some work to do."
For starters, I like to think of myself as a remarkably average white guy in the sense that I have my area of work and study, and my personal interests are what take up the majority of my thinking space that isn't already being used to think about my family and friends. I don't care what race an inventor of a major invention is or was because I just really don't care to learn about who invented what in the first place if it's an invention pertaining to what's outside of my area of work and study. I can tell you plenty of major innovators in the music industry when it comes to instrumental technique, technological advancement, and creative business practises and marketing campaigns, but when it comes to light bulbs I really don't care. I really couldn't care less to be quite honest. And that is how every person in the world is, and I have no reason to feel guilty about that; and furthermore, I am especially uncaring when the data being used to support the argument is so unbelievably outrageous, like for example saying that one Black man invented the personal computer, and the Black man who was chosen to represent the inventor of the personal computer was chosen solely because he was Black and he worked for a company that created a widely successful line of personal computers.
Anyways, thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of State of the Media. Hopefully next time I'll finally be able to get the guy who organized the "17 minutes for 17 victims" school walkout to finally come in and talk about his political views, but if not there's still a lot of fun to be had here in the world of hyperconscious emotional news media interpretations and analyses.
Electret Microphone:
The video attributes the invention to James West, however it would be more accurate to say that both the Foil Electric Microphone and the Electrostatic Transducer used for said microphone was co-patented by West and Gerhard M. Sessler, a German scientist, while the two inventors were working for Bell Labs in 1962. The concept of the electret microphone had been around since the 1920s due to the need for a microphone that didn't require a strong DC bias such as a normal condenser microphone. Before 1962, electret microphones were considered to be too costly and expensive to manufacture since it required a material that could maintain a permanent static charge to remove the necessity of phantom power or a strong bias that's needed to operate a normal condenser microphone. James West and Gerhard Sessler overcame this complication together by discovering that they could use a permanently charged piece of Teflon as a dialectic component to power the microphone thus removing the necessity for phantom power (unless however if the microphone uses a preamplifier circuit). Electret is a combination of the word electric and magnet, since it uses a charged piece of metal, or in other words, an electromagnet. by the 1970s, electret microphones grew to take up at least a third of all microphones used in major recording studios, and the smaller microphones are used for telephones, hearing aids, small recording devices, and et cetera.
Personal Computer:
Mark Dean worked at IBM and was a key figure in the development of the IBM Personal Computer model 5150. He holds three out of nine of IBM's original patents including the invention of a colored monitor, a one thousand megahertz processor chip, and a system framework that allowed the IBM model 5150 communicate with external hardware and software such as printers, floppy disks, and cassette tapes. The first computer to identify itself as a "personal computer" was the Xerox Alto, but IBM is often incorrectly attributed as the inventor of the personal computer because it's revolutionary desktop model 5150 dominated the computer market until it began to decline in the 1990's. It's decline was caused by imitators copying the Model 5150's design, which they were allowed to do because the original model 5150 held no special patenting or copyrighting on its computer while 90% of the machine's software and hardware was outsourced to third-party companies.
Electrical Transistors:
Otis F. Boykin began his work with electrical transistors during the mid 1940's. In 1959, he received a patent for an improved electrical transistor that used a new arrangement of wire to reduce inductance and reactance while also making the overall product much cheaper and resistant to temperature fluctuations. His most notable invention is that of the electronic heart stimulator, or the pacemaker. He was inspired to invent the pacemaker after his mother passed away from heart failure.
Automatic Transmission/Automatic Gear Shift:
The first automatic transmission was invented by the Sturtevant brothers in 1904. With exception and reasonable application of the invention's history, all modern transmission systems can trace their lineage back to the Sturtevant brothers' original invention that was used for the "Horseless Carriages" of the time. Richard Spikes received a patent in 1932 for an improvement upon the original transmission design which created a system that allowed the gears of the transmission to seamlessly connect during a manual gear shift. Spikes patent was received around the same time in which many inventors' ideas were being conglomerated into what eventually became General Motors' Hydra-Matic transmission system in 1939, and the system debuted in the company's 1940 model Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs.
Carbon Filament:
Thomas Edison imagined a device that passed electricity through a carbon filament in an enclosed vacuum for the sole purpose of creating light. He took his imagination and realized it in the form of the light bulb. Lewis Latimer was hired by Hiram Maxim, one of Edison's top rivals at the time, to help Maxim devise a product that was based off of Edison's original invention; however, Maxim wished to specifically improve upon the issue of Edison's light bulb's longevity, as they only lasted a few days at the most. Lewis Latimer took the carbon element (which was sometimes a piece of bamboo, a piece of paper, or some other wood) and encased it in cardboard which prevented the filament from breaking after sustained use thus increasing the lifespan of the Edison light bulb by a significant margin. Modern light bulbs do not use carbon filaments, and instead they use a tungsten filament that is typically wrapped in a double coil pattern and a bulb that is filled with an inert gas such as krypton or argon as opposed to being solely in a vacuum. The first tungsten filament came from Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman who patented the idea in Hungary in 1904, however many inventors have helped improve the efficacy and longevity of the modern light bulb over the many years since its genesis by its inventor, Thomas Edison.
I understand that the process of coming up with a completely original idea is something that is not only rare and practically impossible, the video's creator had the opportunity to use Otis F. Boykin as the guy who literally invented the electronic heart stimulator, which is something they could have made a funny joke about by saying how "you like, literally can't live without a pacemaker." But instead they chose to use him as an example by saying he invented electrical transistors, which is something that he did not do. He improved upon existing designs and concepts of electrical transistors, and his improvement is something that has had a major impact on the human race's technological development; however, to claim that he invented electrical transistors and then to point at an LCD computer monitor as if that were to mean that most of technology wouldn't exist unless this specific individual was able to devise a cheaper and sturdier way to build electrical transistors is absolutely fallacious and devoid of logic or understanding of electronics. This idea is better exemplified with Lewis Latimer and his invention of an improved carbon filament (which I would like to once again emphasize the fact that he did not invent the filament, he simply improved it) being used as an example of a modern invention from a Black inventor that we could not live without; it's blatantly wrong to say that we could not live without the invention of a cardboard-encased carbon filament due to the fact that the majority of light bulbs are either incandescent (which use a tungsten filament) or fluorescent (which uses mercury, inert gasses, and phosphor powder to emit light from an electric current) with rare exception to restaurants and other establishments that want to use the much more expensive and less practical carbon filament bulbs for their vintage aesthetic.
On an opinionated note; I would go so far as to say that it's insulting to Lewis Latimer's name to pretend as if his improved carbon filament is what lights our homes to this very day or to assume that his invention is what he should be ultimately remembered for in the first place. After Latimer patented his improved filament while working for Hiram Maxim, he was then hired by Thomas Edison out of respect for his ingenuity, and then placed Latimer in charge of coordinating the construction of major electrical power plants within big cities and begin the process of lighting up every street in America. Lewis Latimer contributed a significant amount of time, energy, and ingenuity to the transition from the use of candles to the use of permanent electrical lighting fixtures in America during his life, so I don't see why the Buzzfeed video is focusing in on a patent of his that isn't really significant to today's practical applications. I don't know why Buzzfeed would try to intentionally have us all believe that Lewis Latimer invented the incandescent light bulb (which is what the video has done since the girl holds up an incandescent light bulb in the video).
Despite the enormous amount of disinformation, the two girls continue with their experiment and act as if they were living in the colonial New World. The melodramatic attention to things that were invented by Black people coupled with the misleading statements of Black inventions that are still used in modern times leads me to believe that the video is not just trying to point out instances in which a Black invention is being used in a modern context, but the video is also trying to artificially inflate the importance of Black inventors in our history. I do not know why they would want to do this.
For starters, there is no reason to provide misleading information to argue that Black inventors were and are important to our species' technological advancement, because they have and still are and will be important. There are plenty of really, really good examples of this concept, but the video's writers decided to either be lazy or to intentionally misinform their viewers. Furthermore, it should not matter in a modern context as to whether or not an inventor was Black.
[play clip of joyce saying "my cousins came through]
It doesn't mean anything if an inventor was black or white or Indian or native American or what ever race an inventor may be. The existence of black inventors doesn't change anything about Black people as a whole because an individual in the past can't control an individual in the future. Here's an example of this concept; I can trace my family's lineage back to the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that doesn't change who I am right now. Just because Sir Doyle is one of my ancestors doesn't make me any smarter or better at writing or anything at all, really. When I first leaned about how he was in my family tree, I sure thought it was pretty neat, but I didn't change at all just because I'm related to him. The more extreme example is to take this concept of family lineage and apply it to an entire race. Just because there have been a lot of white presidents in our nation's history doesn't mean that white people are any better or any worse. Just because there have been figures that share a race who've reached historical acclaim for one reason or another does not mean that the entire race in the present will share the same characteristics of that small handful (in comparison to the population of the entire race, exempli gratia 44 presidents out of approximately 224 million white people in America) of people. I don't think that this is a radical statement to make, however the video ultimately ends by claiming that we need to know this and that we need to spread and educate the video's artificially inflated and distorted view of the contributions of Black inventors.
[show clip of "so you're saying you couldn't do your work if it weren't for black people]
I guess what I'm asking is, why is this important? What is the benefit of scolding us all for not knowing that Lewis Latimer invented an improved carbon filament for the Edison Light bulb? Why is it so important to to push this idea that Black people are under-appreciated just because I didn't know that Lonnie Johnson, a world renowned nuclear engineer who helped send a spacecraft to Jupiter, invented the Super Soaker?
[play clip of girl saying she feels guilty]
Because white people should feel guilty about not appreciating the contributions made by Black inventors. Quite frankly, I'm curious to know what Kelsey means by the phrase, "I have some work to do."
For starters, I like to think of myself as a remarkably average white guy in the sense that I have my area of work and study, and my personal interests are what take up the majority of my thinking space that isn't already being used to think about my family and friends. I don't care what race an inventor of a major invention is or was because I just really don't care to learn about who invented what in the first place if it's an invention pertaining to what's outside of my area of work and study. I can tell you plenty of major innovators in the music industry when it comes to instrumental technique, technological advancement, and creative business practises and marketing campaigns, but when it comes to light bulbs I really don't care. I really couldn't care less to be quite honest. And that is how every person in the world is, and I have no reason to feel guilty about that; and furthermore, I am especially uncaring when the data being used to support the argument is so unbelievably outrageous, like for example saying that one Black man invented the personal computer, and the Black man who was chosen to represent the inventor of the personal computer was chosen solely because he was Black and he worked for a company that created a widely successful line of personal computers.
Anyways, thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of State of the Media. Hopefully next time I'll finally be able to get the guy who organized the "17 minutes for 17 victims" school walkout to finally come in and talk about his political views, but if not there's still a lot of fun to be had here in the world of hyperconscious emotional news media interpretations and analyses.
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