We all seem to know and remember certain people in the public zeitgeist without effort. Many of the most famous people are in the entertainment industry whether in sports, movies, or music.
All of us have experienced someone disparaging a young person for knowing the lyrics to the latest song but knowing nothing about history or important contemporary issues. Entertainment can help people remember dates, names, and events more easily, and is tied to our emotions in ways that make data easier to recall, making learning through osmosis a viable option to standard teaching and learning.
Meanwhile, the most prominent people in America go about their business mostly unnoticed by popular culture, yet their work is far more significant and lasting than that of most entertainment entities. Some of the unnoticed but significant people are African American women. Many of us recognize that African American women are not only the heart and soul of America’s democratic political machine, but are also, as a group, the voice of conscience for our nation.
I am highlighting three women whom we should get to know better and who are making a huge impact. Aisha Nyandoro is pushing for guaranteed income for Black women, Kizzmekia S. Corbett-Helaire is a pioneering immunologist, and Ruha Benjamin is an insightful sociologist and professor.
Aisha Nyandoro
“Poverty is a systemic failing, not an individual failing.”– Aisha Nyandoro
Poverty: The state of lacking sufficient income, resources, and access to basic necessities — such as food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare — needed for a minimum standard of living.
Aisha Nyandoro is the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit headquartered in Mississippi that is dedicated to ending generational poverty. The organization provides programs and services for families below the poverty line. Part of the vision is to transform community members into successful residents with opportunities that were previously available only to those with higher means. Through the Magnolia Mothers’ Trust, Nyandoro has supported hundreds of mothers across the country and sparked a movement uniquely tailored to the future economy.
Some experts think that many jobs that require routine cognitive and creative tasks will be lost to AI. While this new technology can foster a rich society, individuals will increasingly lose access to resources and services, creating a huge economic chasm.
Nyandoro believes a universal income would help people move out of poverty, and create a more equitable transition as AI changes the economy. Cash payments can act as a baseline for survival for economic stabilization. Money can give people time to retrain, provide for their families, and continue participating in the economy. It is thinking, “Let’s give them the money and see what good could come of it.”
Her idea of universal income closely mirrors that of Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate. Both agree that poverty is not a moral issue but a policy failure, people can be trusted when given money, and aid should be restricted to work requirements. Both have concluded that cash works better than complex social programs. There is no need for these complex programs because people know best what they need. Nyandoro feels that economic pressures lead to insecurity and bad decision-making. Her organization’s views are shaped by data, not political or social ideology.
The major difference between the two universal income proposals is that Nyandoro focuses on low-income Black mothers in local communities, while Yang’s idea is for everyone nationwide. The largest difference is the program’s scale.
The two are solving the same problem for two very different reasons, even though both are pragmatic. Yang approaches it from a clinical perspective, seeking to address a systemic economic disruption. For Nyandoro, solving the problem is personal. She is addressing and combating intergenerational poverty, which she witnessed growing up in Mississippi. She sees poverty as a major problem among Black women like herself in communities where poverty is rampant.
Nyandoro, who comes from a family of social workers and advocates, is a self-described daughter of the South, who always knew she would remain in Mississippi and work there, because in her words, “I was always taught that you grow where you are planted.”
She believes that poverty is a systemic issue, and all citizens carry the responsibility to combat and eradicate it. She eventually realized that guaranteed income was a viable alternative to social programs.
She is the founder and CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit working with federally-subsidized housing residents to reach their school, work, and life goals. Her research showed that guaranteed income, or universal income, has been successfully implemented in other countries.
The organization’s program, Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT), is the longest-running guaranteed income program in the United States. It provided $1,000 per month for 12 months, initially to 20 mothers during the pilot, and has expanded to more than 400 mothers across multiple cohorts. Children also receive a $1,000 deposit into a college savings account. Other benefits included a survey finding that participants were better able to pay their bills, kept all their public benefits while receiving cash, and had enough money budgeted for food. In 2024, she was recognized on TIME’s annual list of 100 emerging leaders shaping the future and was added to the cover story.
Because of the leadership, creativity, and success of Nyandoro and Springboard, economic and financial experts agree that cash payments promote individual freedom and dignity by helping families meet basic needs, build savings, and stabilize budgets. She has pushed economic and financial theories to a new frontier.
She has built a holistic ecosystem that outpaces existing programs in effectiveness and positive outcomes. These facts are supported by empirical evidence and research, which show that her philosophy outperforms existing inefficient programs. The income provides a lane for financially challenged African American women to overcome economic hardship and achieve their life goals.
For more information on Aisha Nyandora, visit https://springboardto.org/about-us/leadership/.
Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire
“I never in a million years expected that there was actually going to be a pandemic. Luckily, I was ready. I’ve been preparing since I first stepped foot into a laboratory when I was 16 years old.”– Kizzmekia Corbet-Helaire
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire did not know she would be placed in a position of great esteem due to the arrival of a virus that devastated the world. At the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, she helped design a successful vaccine strategy in record time. Her success was forged years earlier as she researched SARS and MERS viruses, which helped identify a spike in (S) protein as the best target for immune protection. The stabilizing mutations identified in earlier research enabled clear imaging of the spike protein, helping her team determine its structure by cryogenic electron microscopy. And the rest is history.
Corbett-Helaire is from Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, and earned her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina. During her time at the university, she conducted research in Sri Lanka on human antibodies to the dengue virus. She recognized the commonality between the newer coronavirus and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. She successfully worked with her team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center to protect the public from the coronavirus that led to the nation’s lockdown. Her role in developing the Moderna vaccine helped calm and heal the nation.
It is impossible to work in healthcare without addressing issues of bias and universal access. Corbett-Helaire is using her credibility to speak on these issues of African Americans and health. She also teaches the history that makes some Americans uncomfortable, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. She does not simply reflect on the past; she uses that information to peer into the future and explain to citizens how they can trust the healthcare system through readily available research and data.
She works for her community through engagements with churches, interviews, and forums, and speaks extensively to HBCUs, promoting healthcare safety and the benefits of STEM education. She has emphasized that more Black children should study STEM subjects in middle and high school and enter the information technology workforce, which has a low percentage of Black professionals relative to the population.
Corbett-Helaire has won many awards. To name just a few: the Benjamin Franklin NextGen Award recognized her outstanding contributions to life sciences, including COVID-19 vaccine development; the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute Rising Star Award recognized her as a rising leader in vaccine science; Time100 Next (Innovators) highlighted her as one of the next generation of influential leaders; and the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding (2022) awarded her jointly with Anthony Fauci for contributions to global health through vaccine science.
She became a target of anti-vaccine communities because they claimed vaccines are harmful even without evidence to support that view. Since she openly acknowledged historical health abuses, such as the Tuskegee Experiment, she opened herself up to more criticism from people who want their history to filter out anything that highlights America’s social ills.
She was criticized for her tweets concerning the lack of diversity on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She received equal scrutiny for stating that African Americans were dying disproportionately from the coronavirus. She has criticized science’s lack of connection to Black society, pointing out that Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is in the middle of a Black neighborhood that does not benefit from the institution at all.
Just like millions of Americans, some of my close friends and family including my big sister died from the coronavirus. It was a very dark time for me, and that sadness engulfed our country. It is very comforting to know that a Black woman began addressing these problems years before they arose. I am also grateful to her STEM teacher, who apparently had a positive influence on her, as Corbett-Helaire knew what she wanted to do from the moment she stepped into the laboratory. Her presence means that we are all safer today. And if another pandemic sweeps the world, our chances of survival are increased thanks to her and her team.
For more information on Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, visit https://hsph.harvard.edu/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMw4UWnBV7g
Ruha Benjamin
“We are trapped inside the lopsided imagination of those that monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”– Ruha Benjamin
As I neared retirement from teaching high school STEM courses, I became more cynical about the future of education and the kind of world we were building for students’ futures. I did not feel good about it. I even wrote a piece about it, “No Classroom for Old Men,” in my book “Binary Society.” This was during the First Trump administration. COVID was spreading across the world, and I witnessed firsthand an increase in racial rhetoric and tension among the students. As the only African American teacher at the school, I was particularly sensitive to these troubling changes. To add to the problems, telephones were, and still are, the most destructive thing ever placed in the pathway of education.
During this time, I was reading Ruha Benjamin‘s book, “Race After Technology,” in which she takes an interesting view of the state of STEM education and how bias is built into technology, allowing the fingerprints of racism to be embedded in all systems.
There was a passage in her book that I particularly agreed with. She was speaking about the racism she found unsettling in her classroom and school. She witnessed how white supremacy has been planted in a younger generation, writing: “I knew such direct exposure to this type of unadulterated racism among people whom I encounter every day would quickly steal my enthusiasm for teaching.” She added that we will not age out ofracism.
Benjamin is one of the most important voices on the topic of technological racism embedded in our networks and applications. She was born to an African American father and a Persian/Indian mother in India, but spent time in California, Africa, and South Carolina while growing up. Her educational background is in sociology and anthropology, and she received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her idea is that technology is not benign and often reinforces inequality through algorithms. Digital automation, which too often removes the human element from the decision-making process, often worsens the situation for those who try to use it. “Neural systems” also produce racial inequality, gender imbalance, and economic exclusion due to how information collected is used. Benjamin also has a healthy skepticism about how AI will make things better, so-called innovation that ignores the human experience, and data-driven systems that replace human judgment.
Every student, teacher, or parent should read Benjamin’s warnings about our failing educational system. She writes that technology is often used to manage, monitor, and discipline marginalized populations. Surveillance cameras are always deployed first in the lowest socioeconomic areas, serving as a testing ground for all future technologies.
Race after Technology won the 2020 Oliver Cox Cromwell Book Prize, and that same year it won the Brooklyn Public Library Award for Nonfiction. In 2024, Benjamin won the MacArthur Award (Genius Grant) and was named a MacArthur Fellow, one of only 22 recipients chosen for their exceptional creativity. Her influence is powerful enough to drive policy changes on how we interact and manage our technology in educational settings.
For more information on Ruha Benjamin, visit https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
Editor’s note: Thomas Holt Russell is founder and director of SEMtech, writer, educator, photographer, modern-day Luddite, existentialist, and secular humanist. For more information, visit http://thomasholtrussell.zenfolio.com/
