7-5-12 Links Roundup

• Indian Scientist Forgotten In Higgs Boson Drama (Wall Street Journal)

The scientist in question, Satyendra Nath Bose, worked with Albert Einstein in the 1920s and made discoveries that led to a kind of particle being named for him.

It was Peter Higgs, a British physicist, who in the 1960s made advances in the field, resulting in the naming of Higgs boson.

Indian newspapers have been unhappy that their star scientist’s name has somehow been forgotten in all of this.

For a start, only the “H” in Higgs boson is capitalized in most cases. In many cases, it’s referred to as the Higgs particle, erasing all allusion to the Indian scientist.

• Mexico’s ‘Maquiladora’ Labor System Keeps Workers In Poverty (McClatchy Newspapers)

By day, Sergio Martinez labors in a modern air-conditioned factory a few miles from the Texas border, a human cog in the global supply chain that helps build pickups and tractor-trailer cabs. He wears a smart uniform at work.

At night, he comes home to a dirt-floor shack with a bare light bulb and no indoor plumbing. Mosquitoes buzz incessantly. He and his family live like poor dirt farmers.

His salary of $7.50 a day is enough to provide for the family dinner table, the cost of bootleg water and electricity, and an occasional article of discarded clothing for his wife or two girls, but rarely anything else.

Martinez, 35, is emblematic of the industrial sector of Mexico, a magnet for foreign investment hitched to a strong U.S. locomotive. Factories in Mexico pump out plasma TVs, BlackBerry smartphones, kitchen blenders, airplane components and automobiles. Yet millions of workers, like Martinez, can only dream of climbing from the lower class to buy the appliances, smartphones and cars they help manufacture.

• Racism Dead; Hub Woman Rejoices (The Hyphenated Life)

As a 41-year-old black woman living in America, you can imagine my visceral reaction. “It’s about #*!^@% time!” But I quickly moved past that, because I couldn’t wait another second to dive into a column announcing the sunset of white racism, written by my former Globe colleague and syndicated conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby.

We’ve been breathlessly forecasting the arrival of a post-racial society going on four years. Now, according to Jacoby, it’s Jubilee time. “America’s racist past is dead and gone,” he proclaimed, and as I read on all I could think is, this is gonna be some funeral.

In a 2009 column, Jacoby wrote about the enduring hatred of anti-Semitism, calling it a mutable and unyielding virus that morphs over time, but never dies. Thank God for black people white racism doesn’t work that way. And apparently, we literally do have God to thank: To hear Jacoby tell it, the recent election of the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., a black New Orleans pastor, to lead the historically racist Southern Baptist Convention isn’t merely a milestone in a long and often tortured American story lived in black and white. Luter’s rise is actually proof positive that this thing we call racism — our original sin, the fire and water of this country’s baptism — is once and for all in our rear view.

• The Evolution Of A Down Ass Chick, Part II (or Why Miss Independent Is Probably Single) (The Crunk Feminist Collective)

My mis-independence was informed by the singleness of many of the women in my life and the way they came together to take care of me and each other, sometimes with harsh words warning me that blackgirls become strongblackwomen, and I better not depend too much on anybody but myself (and, when applicable, them). What they didn’t say was that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be kept, cared for, and loved on. I imagine they didn’t want to get my hopes up so they taught me to be prepared because the ability and luxury of being dependent was reserved for rich women or white women or rich white women and we were none of those things.

The lessons I was given insinuated that I should never tolerate the malfeasance of a man, (as in “you can do bad by yourself”) while watching women, with needs that went beyond money-help or affection, put up with all manner of foolishness from men (as in “do as I say, not as I do”).

The confusion of these childhood lessons are equivalent to the confusion forwarded through mainstream media and hip hop. Last month I wrote about the evolution of a down ass chick, and while an independent woman, like the “good girl” I discussed in the first installment, is in theory the antithesis of the stereotypical down ass chick, I think in a way she can be manipulated into another version of the DAC, riddled with contradictions about being desirable and unwanted at the same time.

• Fashion In Russia: “Proving” That Muslim Women Are Beautiful, Smart And Fashionable (Muslimah Media Watch)

The coverage of the event in the Spanish-speaking media provides further information on the ideas behind the Islamic Style festival. Color ABC quotes Abbyasov as reaffirming the idea that Muslim women must be modest and cover everything except their hands, face and feet. Yet, the article highlights the beauty of the collections and the elegance of the models in the runway despite the fact that the article also mentions that some of the clothes were seen as “too tight” and the heels “too high.” Despite the fact that Islamic fashion shows may bring together a number of Muslim designers and models for the sake of offering alternatives to mainstream western clothing for Muslim women, coverage of such events, and the events themselves, perpetuate the idea that it is ok to judge Muslim women purely based on their clothing.

The Color ABC piece also aims to provide a glimpse into the fact that Russian religious authorities are trying to prove that Islam and modernity can interact with each other in a positive manner even through fashion. Terra further quotes the shows spokesperson as drawing the line between Middle Eastern Islam and Russian Islam by explaining that “in Russia we have never had a tradition of black tunics like in the Arab world. Russian Muslim women do not spend their days locked in the houses without talking to anyone.”