Whitey Ford
02-13-2021, 10:08 PM
The Path to Racial Justice Runs Through This Agency
President Biden should choose the next director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office carefully.
Anywhere a nigger can see an angle to scream raycisss! and weasel in on white people's accomplishments, they will!
https://i.imgur.com/q5IuRma.png
Structural racism has a long history in our patent system. Like redlining, the patent system played a huge role in denying Black people opportunities for upward mobility — opportunities that were readily available to white people. Enslaved people weren’t allowed to patent their inventions. In the South, their white enslavers often got the patents instead. (The cotton gin and the mechanical reaper are thought to have been at least partly invented by people who were enslaved.) The ingenuity of Black people was appropriated and monetized. Their resulting low rates of patenting were weaponized by some to argue that Black people lacked ingenuity.
Even today, Black people account for only a tiny fraction of patent holders. Research by Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State University who served on Mr. Biden’s transition team, indicates that from 1975 to 2008, fewer than 1 percent of people granted patents were Black. Whether that’s due to structural issues in the Patent and Trademark Office or to systemic barriers Black people face that make them less likely to apply for patents is unclear; the agency’s colorblind approach means it doesn’t collect demographic data about applicants. Since we can’t fix what we don’t measure, the next director must make changing this a priority. And, given the agency’s historical lack of diverse leadership, the Biden administration should strongly consider a person of color for the role.
https://archive.is/qW7YH#selection-309.0-313.98
President Biden should choose the next director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office carefully.
Anywhere a nigger can see an angle to scream raycisss! and weasel in on white people's accomplishments, they will!
https://i.imgur.com/q5IuRma.png
Structural racism has a long history in our patent system. Like redlining, the patent system played a huge role in denying Black people opportunities for upward mobility — opportunities that were readily available to white people. Enslaved people weren’t allowed to patent their inventions. In the South, their white enslavers often got the patents instead. (The cotton gin and the mechanical reaper are thought to have been at least partly invented by people who were enslaved.) The ingenuity of Black people was appropriated and monetized. Their resulting low rates of patenting were weaponized by some to argue that Black people lacked ingenuity.
Even today, Black people account for only a tiny fraction of patent holders. Research by Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State University who served on Mr. Biden’s transition team, indicates that from 1975 to 2008, fewer than 1 percent of people granted patents were Black. Whether that’s due to structural issues in the Patent and Trademark Office or to systemic barriers Black people face that make them less likely to apply for patents is unclear; the agency’s colorblind approach means it doesn’t collect demographic data about applicants. Since we can’t fix what we don’t measure, the next director must make changing this a priority. And, given the agency’s historical lack of diverse leadership, the Biden administration should strongly consider a person of color for the role.
https://archive.is/qW7YH#selection-309.0-313.98