How Everything is About Race Pt. 4
Yup. Everything.
Hello and welcome back! It’s once again time for How Everything is About Race! If you are unfamiliar, once a month we throw three darts at our office map of every possible thing and then explain the history of race behind those completely random things! This has included things one might assume to have no racial context, like the Oklahoma panhandle and Nirvana (the band) and bathing, but go ahead and click through to see what they say about assumptions!
This month being Women’s History Month, the darts have coincidentally landed on…
Home Security Systems
Marie Van Brittan Brown and her husband Albert lived in Jamaica, Queens, NY. In 1966, unable to depend on the police for all the obvious reasons, Marie—a nurse— created the first home security system. It looked like this:
Intersectionality
Law professor, civil rights scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw is credited with coining the term “intersectionality”, but it’s existed as a concept for Black women intellectuals just about as long as you might imagine. For example, as Black feminist visionary Anna Julia Cooper wrote in 1892, “Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.”
3D Movies
1980 was the year when NASA physicist Valerie Thomas patented the illusion transmitter, a mechanism that creates the appearance of a 3D image. This was used in development of 3D movies, but more importantly, surgeons use it to generate images inside the human body.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/brown-marie-van-brittan-1922-1999/