Black Kos, Week In Review – Daily Kos

Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (born December 15, 1950) is an American theoretical physicist, known for work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Sylvester served on President Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Gates, the oldest of four siblings, was born in Tampa, Florida. He is the son of Sylvester James Gates Sr., a career U.S. Army man, and Charlie Engels Gates. His mother died at age 44 of breast cancer when he was 11. Gates, Sr. raised his children while serving full-time in the U.S. Army and retired as a sergeant major after 27 years of service — one of the first African Americans to earn this position. Gates, Sr., later worked in public education and as a union organizer.
Both of Gates’ parents were extraordinarily committed to their children’s educations, though neither had the opportunity to go to college. Gates, Sr. never finished high school, as he enlisted in the U.S Army at the age of seventeen. The family moved many times while Gates was growing up, but, in January 1963, settled in Orlando, Florida, where Gates Jr. attended Jones High School—his first experience in a segregated African-American school. Comparing his own school’s quality to neighboring white schools, “I understood pretty quickly that the cards were really stacked against us.” Nevertheless, an 11th grade course in physics established Gates’ career interest in physics, especially its mathematical side. At his father’s urging, he applied for admission to MIT.
Gates received BS (1973) and PhD (1977) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Gates co-authored Superspace (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry. Gates’ research has played a foundational role in understanding twisted multiplets and their implications for nonlinear sigma models, generalized complex geometry, and duality in supersymmetric theories.
Gates was nominated by the Department of Energy as one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s “Nifty Fifty” Speakers to present his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. He is on the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public.
Gates was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010-11) and is a Residential Scholar at MIT’s Simmons Hall. He is pursuing ongoing research into string theory, supersymmetry, and supergravity at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
Gates has been featured in both TurboTax and Verizon commercials and has a been featured extensively on NOVA PBS programs on physics, notably “The Elegant Universe” (2003). He completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality (2006) for The Teaching Company consisting of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople. During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated a ballet “The Elegant Universe”, where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms connected to his scientific research. Gates Appeared on the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Gates also appeared in the BBC Horizon documentary The Hunt for Higgs in 2012. Gates recently appeared in another NOVA documentary “Big Bang Machine” in 2015……
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Donald Trump’s war on history appears to have widened, with The Washington Post reporting that his administration has ordered the removal of multiple signs and exhibits at national parks related to the history of slavery.
The Post reported that these moves are the result of a deranged executive order Trump signed in March, in which he ordered the Interior Department to whitewash materials at national parks and other federal sites that recount the factual story of American inequality — which the order called “corrosive ideology.” I’ve written previously about the disturbing parallels between Trump’s attacks on museums and those waged by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.
According to the Post:
The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back.
That historic photo — known as “The Scourged Back” — shows Peter Gordon, an enslaved man who was whipped after attempting to escape. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, it’s one of the most famous Civil War-era portraits ever taken. Such accurate depictions of the brutality of slavery evidently run afoul of Trump’s blissful ignorance, given his gripe that Smithsonian museums focus too much on “how bad Slavery was.”
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The Rev. Emanuel Cleaver III wants a second Civil Rights Movement in response to President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans who are redrawing congressional district boundaries to increase their power in Washington.
In Missouri, the GOP’s effort comes at the expense of Cleaver’s father, Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, and many of his Kansas City constituents who fear a national redistricting scramble will reverse gains Black Americans won two generations ago and leave them without effective representation on Capitol Hill.
The Rev. Emanuel Cleaver III wants a second Civil Rights Movement in response to President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans who are redrawing congressional district boundaries to increase their power in Washington.
“If we, the people of faith, do not step up, we are going to go back even further,” the younger Cleaver told the St. James Church congregation on a recent Sunday, drawing affirmations of “Amen” in the sanctuary where his father, also a minister, launched his first congressional bid in 2004.

From around 2014 to 2021, two important, long-needed “reckonings” were happening. The mainstream media was reevaluating its coverage of politics and beginning to recognize that its attempt to cover politics “neutrally” had resulted in downplaying how radical and antidemocratic the modern Republican Party had become. Meanwhile, the entire country, including the media, was looking at whether the United States had done enough to address the deep racial inequality that remained from centuries of discrimination against Native Americans and African Americans in particular. Black journalists were acutely aware of both problems, making them some of the leading voices in this period, perhaps best exemplified by the “1619 Project” helmed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times.
The paper has not yet commented on Attiah’s departure, and there may be other details I am not privy to here. But her apparent dismissal fits with broader changes happening at the paper.
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked from publication an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris that the Opinion staff wrote last fall. He attended Trump’s inauguration. In February, he announced the paper’s Opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” In June, he named a former Wall Street Journal editorial page staffer to run the Post’s Opinion section. Nearly all of the left-leaning writers, myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that the Post would not want our content.
Attiah opted to stay. I was worried that her time at the Post would not be long, and it was not. The Post is far from the only news institution swinging to the right, either because its owners want to curry favor with Trump, because they are aligned with him on some issues, or a bit of both. CBS News is going in a pro-Trump direction even faster, installing conservatives in key roles. Outlets such as CNN and The New York Times are constantly casting Trump’s autocratic actions in muted language, seeming desperate to not be seen as liberally biased.
When it was all over, Kamala Harris couldn’t believe it. “I could barely breathe,” she writes in her new book about learning she had lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump.
One of her aides peeled “Madame President” off celebratory cupcakes before serving them to crushed staffers. Harris kept asking, “My God, my God, what will happen to our country?”
The next morning was no easier. “I was ashamed to realize I was in the denial and bargaining stages of grief, a very long way from acceptance,” she wrote.
It’s one of several raw admissions in Harris’ book, “107 Days,” that is scheduled for release Tuesday. The title refers to the length of the hyperspeed campaign that the former vice president launched against Trump after Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Although Harris earned a reputation as guarded and circumspect, the book has the tone of someone who is finished biting her tongue. She concedes mistakes, reveals frustrations and details some of the stranger moments from her race.

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