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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
After completing more than two years of basic training, the six women and seven men were chosen from a record-breaking 18,000 applicants representing a wide variety of backgrounds and specialties, from experienced pilots to scientists, engineers and doctors.
The group includes two candidates from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which has participated in a joint training program with the US since 1983. "They are the best of the best: they are highly qualified and very diverse, and they represent all of America," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. They include five people of color, including the first Iranian-American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli who flew combat missions in Afghanistan and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
The group, known as the "Turtles", wore blue flight jumpsuits and took turns approaching the podium to receive their astronaut pins, as one of their classmates paid tribute to their character and shared playful and heartfelt anecdotes.
After being selected in 2017, the class completed training in spacewalking at NASA's underwater Neutral Buoyancy Lab, robotics, the systems of the International Space Station, piloting the T-38 training jet and Russian language lessons.
They are the first to graduate since NASA announced the Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024, this time on its south pole, as the US plans to place the next man and first woman on lunar soil and set up an orbital space station.
-- submitted from IRC
Related: Eyeing Moon, NASA hosts first public astronaut graduation ceremony
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @03:59PM
This comes down to two different and mutually exclusive meanings for equality. There is equality of opportunity and there is equality of result. I am completely and absolutely in favor of the former, but equally strongly opposed to the latter. For affirmative action this was one of the key issues. Quoting Senator Hubert Humphrey (who was a major player in the passing of the LBJ's civil rights act): "...there is nothing in [section of the Civil Rights Act related to employment] that will give power to the Commission to require hiring, firing, and promotion to meet a racial 'quota.' ... Title VII is designed to encourage the hiring on basis of ability and qualifications, not race or religion." Affirmative Action was supposed to be about judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It's only in recent times we've gone down this really messed up path.
Ending racism is simple, and you tend to hear the same thing from many self made blacks. Here [youtube.com] is Morgan Freeman's take on black history month. He states it is "absurd" for reasons similar to why Neil DeGrasse Tyson also refuses [blackenterprise.com] to partake in black history month. Why? When you invite him to talk during Black History Month you're just doing that because he's black. But what does the color of his skin have to do with what he is? With being an astrophysicist and great scientific communicator? Nothing. It's belittling and denigrating. People didn't want to hear what Carl Sagan had to say because he was a first gen child of Russian emigres, they wanted to hear what he had to say because he was a phenomenal communicator. To end racism just treat blacks like people - no less and no more. Same thing for other identities. I'm only focusing on black here for historical reasons.
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Let's go in a different direction for a minute though. Let's ignore the rightness or wrongness of this all and simply ask, does fighting racism with racism even work? Well first we have to ascertain the goal. And I think that goal would probably be to improve race relations by making normally underrepresented or non-represented groups feel more included and to avoid another 'whitey on the moon'. [youtube.com] The next question we need to ask is when did this begin? That's harder to measure but social media has no doubt played a major role in it. And one of the primary warcries there has been 'why so white.' So let's evaluate!
Here [google.com] is a Google trends for the aforementioned phrase. Other similar phrases seem to show similar time frames. Sometime in late 2011 it peaked and stayed there. Here [gallup.com] is a graph of race relations from Gallup. They start to plummet at just about the same time. One would say this paradoxical, but I think it's to be expected. These actions, again, treat blacks like they're idiots. Do NASA think blacks aren't going to know this is literally 'token black girl'? Do they not think everybody is going to realize they're picking people based on skin color and not merit? Who exactly is this making happy besides the twits on Twitter? This isn't going to do anything except inflame racial tensions.
Again this is why racism is never acceptable. Something we always tend to forget is that literally every single generation makes up their excuses for why their racism is not really racism.