The Influential BIPOC, Woman and Traditions that Influence the World of Work
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” — Harry S. Truman
In multiple fields and disciplines, there is lack of acknowledgment and use of content created by black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), women and non-western traditions around the world.
This became crystal clear to me when I formally evaluated a very popular federal leardership program and noted that in the entire 30-day program — which was over 120 hours of training — 98% of the resources/references used to create the material was authored by a white, cis-gendered male.
I was further disturbed when I saw in a popular pose on Twitter a list of the 100 most influential people in learning and development and the picture looked like first 100 Presidents of Rotary International.
There is merit in drawing attention to the works, ideas, inventions, and thought leadership of BIPOC and women in multiple fields and disciplines.
The short list that I’ve prepared here, when added to the current list, paints a more complete picture of the individuals whose contributions have laid everlasting foundations in multiple fields and disciplines.
I created this list to inform, motivate engagement, learning, and pride in the fact that we too are great minds fully capable and equipped to bring about seismic and lasting changes in the world of business, art, technology and philosophy. Our philosophies and theories, although lost in history, do exist, and they are worth discovering.
The contributions of many of these black, Indigenous, people of color, and women (BIPOCW) pioneers, thought leaders, inventors and leaders are unknown and/or their contributions have been coopted and falsely claimed by individuals in the dominant culture. I invite you to do your own research on these very fascinating people and the work they have done to help us grow, mature, and thrive today.
Feel free to watch the video where I explain why I decided to complete almost 90 hours of research to create this list. Start at the 11:10 minute timestamp.
Ptah Hotep was a renowned Egyptian philosopher. Acknowledged for among others, “The Maxims of Ptahhote.” Was a leading educator with literature pieces aimed at educating on governance, which is used today in understanding organizational leadership.
Imhotep was an Egyptian chancellor to the pharaoh Djoser, probable architect of the Djoser’s step pyramid, and high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Little is known of Imhotep as a historical figure, but in the 3000 years following his death, he was gradually glorified and deified.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black Liberation activist, and one of the most prominent scholars in United States history. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. She advocated for a model of classical education espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois, “designed to prepare eligible students for higher education and leadership”, Cooper made significant contributions to social science fields, particularly in sociology.
Frantz Omar Fanon (also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban.
Dr. Maxie Clarence Maultsby Jr., was an American psychiatrist, author of several books on emotional and behavioral self-management and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists. He was the founder of the psychotherapeutic method, Rational Behavioral Therapy (RBT), a technique addresses all three groups of learned behaviors directly: the cognitive, the emotive, and the physical. Through his work and therapeutic method, Dr. Maultsby explored emotional and behavioral self-management. Through rational behavior therapy he formulated a comprehensive system of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy and counseling that incorporated the most recent neuropsychological facts about how the brain works in relation to emotional and behavioral self-control. His method of emotional self-help is called rational self-counseling.
Alvin Ailey Jr. was an African American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). He created AAADT and its affiliated Ailey School as havens for nurturing black artists and expressing the universality of the African American experience through dance. His work fused theatre, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with black vernacular, creating hope-fueled choreography that continues to spread global awareness of black life in America. Ailey’s choreographic masterpiece Revelations is recognized as one of the most popular and most performed ballets in the world.
Dr. Linda James Myers is internationally known for developing the theory of Optimal Psychology. Optimal psychology focuses on the interconnectedness that one has to all living people and things, and the significant role that one’s culture and spiritual nature can have in creating healthy mindsets. Dr Myers’ Oneness model of human functioning offers a transdisciplinary focus that builds on insights from the wisdom tradition of African deep thought and converges with modern physics and Eastern philosophies. Her current research interests comprise the application of that model to a broad range of issues from health and education to business ethics.
Dr. Philip Emeagwali was born in Nigeria in 1954. The noted black inventor received acclaim based, at least in part, on his study of nature, specifically bees. Emeagwali saw an inherent efficiency in the way bees construct and work with honeycomb and determined computers that emulate this process could be the most efficient and powerful. In 1989, emulating the bees’ honeycomb construction, Emeagwali used 65,000 processors to invent the world’s fastest computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second. As one of the most famous African American inventors of the 20th century, Dr. Emeagwali also has won the Gordon Bell Prize — the Nobel Prize for computation. His computers are currently being used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.
Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity.” It is often translated as “I am because we are,” or “humanity towards others,” or in Xhosa, “umntu ngumntu ngabantu” but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all of us. Ubuntu values creative cooperation, empathetic communication, and teamwork.
Christopher Emdin is a professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University. At Columbia, he launched the Center for Health Equity and Urban Science Education with Dr. Barbara Wallace in 2013. He is author of the book, Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation, and regular contributor to HuffPost. Commentary on his work on race, culture, inequality, and education has appeared in numerous publications. He developed and partnered with the rapper GZA and the website Rap Genius to develop the Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S, which engages students in science through the creation of raps and a final rap battle competition. Emdin is founder of the popular #HipHopEd web chat and social movement. He is a leading researcher in hip hop, science, and education.
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings. Culturally relevant teaching was made popular by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings in the early 1990s. The term she created was defined as one “that empowers students to maintain cultural integrity, while succeeding academically”.
Alma Trinidad is a Filipina American scholar Alma Trinidad developed and proposed the term and theoretical framework of a critical Indigenous pedagogy of place in research with Indigenous youth involved in a Hawaiian food justice program.
Charles Clinton Spaulding C.C. Spaulding was one of the most influential African American businesspeople in the 20th Century. He was a thought leader whose philosophies provided much needed advice to African American entrepreneurs and executives in the Jim Crow period of the United States. His writing preceded renowned management pioneers and gurus like Henri Fayol and Chester Bernard and reflect principles we still endorse today in management and entrepreneurship. His article “The Administration of Big Business” was published in the Pittsburgh Courier, a once popular African American newspaper, and it outlined Spaulding’s eight “fundamental necessities” for effectively managing a business.
Stafford Hood is a Professor with the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He co-created the Culturally Responsive Evaluation, a holistic framework that rejects culture-free evaluation and recognized that culturally defined values and beliefs lie at the heart of any evaluative effort.
素质 Suzhi (quality or human quality) is an indigenous concept embedded in the centuries-long historical context of China. Suzhi development has been focused on three key dimensions, moral, physical, and mental, as a way of building quality employees and citizens. It involves an attempt to move away from test-oriented teaching toward critical thinking, problem solving, and other analytical skills.
Angela Davis. Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, feminist, and author. Her work as an educator — both at the university level and in the larger public sphere — has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of nine books and has lectured throughout the U.S. as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America.
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist known for the development of the entity-relationship model. An entity–relationship model (or ER model) describes interrelated things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. In software engineering, an ER model is commonly formed to represent things a business needs to remember to perform business processes.
Sophie Germain was a mathematician, philosopher, and physicist She is best known for her work in number theory, but her work in the theory of elasticity is also important to mathematics.
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond basic calculations and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely regarded as the first to recognize the full potential of computers and one of the first computer programmers.
Molefi Kete Asante is an American professor and philosopher. Asante is known for his writings on Afrocentricity, a school of thought that has influenced the fields of sociology, intercultural communication, critical theory, political science, the history of Africa, and social work.
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was an Afro-European virtuoso violinist, born in 1778 in Biała Podlaska, Poland. Recognized as being of exceptional talent, he performed for King George III at Windsor Castle, the Prince Regent at Brighton Pavilion the Pump Rooms at Bath and across southern England.
Lee Yuk-wing was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for adapting and popularizing the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener and for his own research on statistical communication theory.
Sameera Moussa was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She worked hard for this purpose and throughout her intensive research, she produced a historic equation that would help break the atoms of cheap metals such as copper, paving the way for a cheap nuclear bomb
Edward Said was a Palestinian American, was a polymath scholar, literary critic, professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. in 1978 he published Orientalism, his best-known work and one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century. He was also an excellent pianist who for several years wrote music criticism for The Nation.
Homai Vyerawalla was India’s first woman photojournalist. Her images documented her country, noataly its struggle for independence, from the 1930s until the 70’s. Many of her photos were published under a pseudonym, Dalda 13. Later in life she was awarded Pandma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award.
Maitreyi was an Indian philosopher who lived during the later Vedic period in ancient India. Maitreyi is cited as an example of the educational opportunities available to women in Vedic India, and their philosophical achievements. She is considered a symbol of Indian intellectual women, and an institution is named in her honor in New Delhi.
Yetnebersh Nigussie is a lawyer and disability rights activist from Ethiopia. In 2017, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “her inspiring work promoting the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities, allowing them to realize their full potential and changing mindsets in our societies.”
Mary Astell Mary Astell was an English Proto feminist writer, philosopher, and rhetorician. Her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women has earned her the title “the first English feminist.
Georgina Mumba is a disability inclusion advocate in Zambia. She has made vast achievements in the field of special needs education.
Ernest Everett Just (E.E. Just) was a pioneering American biologist, academic and science writer. Just’s legacies are his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms and his influences in analog cybernetics. Just’s work, particularly that on information encoded in non-symbolic representation was taken up by Ross G. Henderson, an important influence in the General Systems Theory (GST) community which in turn influenced the origins of cybernetics through studies of aggregate self-organizing phenomena and positive feedback loops.
Ory Okolloh is a Kenyan activist, lawyer, and blogger. She runs Mzalendo, a pioneering civic website that tracks the performance of Kenya’s Parliament and its Parliamentarians. Okolloh is part of a wave of young Africans who are using the power of blogging, SMS, and web-enabled openness to push their countries forward and help Africans to truly connect.
Hypatia was an astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician, who brought about development in the field of astronomy. In the twentieth century, Hypatia became seen as an icon for women’s rights and a precursor to the feminist movement
Gargi Vachaknavi was an Indian philosopher and an intellectual. She made significant contributions to propagate education.
Eliza Suggs widely promoted inclusion in society. Despite her disability, she opted for activist activities and become the spear head for community inclusivity of differently abled individuals.
Maria Gaetana Agnes was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university. She made mathematical contributions that are currently used in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained a BA in Social Studies and later a Ph.D. in Sociology and Personality Psychology at Harvard University. She now focuses her research on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has authored several books focusing on the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects.
Albert John Luthuli was a South African scholar and tribal leader. He used his Christian knowledge to lead and promote education and learning. A scholarship foundation was founded in his honor to help African students study at university.
Gerald A. Lawson created the first home video game system that used interchangeable cartridges, offering gamers a chance to play a variety of games. This approach also gave video game makers a way to earn profits by selling individual games, a business model that exists today.
Herman George Canady was the first psychologist to examine the role of the race of the examiner as a bias factor in IQ testing. His master’s thesis discussed the role of race of the examiner in establishing testing rapport and provided suggestions for establishing an adequate testing environment in which African American students could thrive. He was instrumental in founding the West Virginia Psychological Association, the West Virginia state board of psychological examiners, and the Charleston Guidance Clinic.
Paulo Freire. The most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Freire, has left a significant mark on thinking about progressive practice. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is currently one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia). His insistence on situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants has opened a series of possibilities for the way informal educators can approach practice.
Dr. Erik J. Huffman is an award-winning cybersecurity professional, educator, and entrepreneur. Dr. Huffman is a founding researcher in the emerging field of Cyberpsychology with studies totaling over 10,000 participants. His research has been presented worldwide and on the TEDx state with his Talk, “Human Hacking: The Psychology Behind Cybersecurity.” He founded Handshake Leadership in 2012 on the principle of “Purpose over Profit”
Gloria Jean Watkins (Bell Hooks) was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The focus of hooks’ writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.
Julius Kambarage Nyerere also called Mwalimu (Swahili: “Teacher”) was first prime minister of independent Tanganyika (1961), who later became the first president of the new state of Tanzania (1964). Nyerere was committed to the creation of an egalitarian society based on cooperative agriculture in Tanzania. He collectivized village farmlands, carried out mass literacy campaigns, and instituted free and universal education. Her termed his experimentation ujamaa (Swahili: “familyhood”), a name that emphasized the blend of economic cooperation, racial and tribal harmony, and moralistic self-sacrifice that he sought to achieve.
Nana Asma’u was a princess, poet, and teacher. She remains a revered figure in northern Nigeria. For many she is recognized as a precursor to modern feminism in Africa.
Zera Yacob was a seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosopher from northern Ethiopia, Amhara, and Tigray regions. His 1667 treatise, developed around 1630 and known in the original Ge’ez language as the Hatäta (Inquiry), is one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy and important to the development of natural science. Many of his ideas predate similar ideas described by European philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment, the latter of whom form the basis of the Western canon while Yacob remains comparatively obscure to this day.
Anton Wilhelm Amo became the first African to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at a European university. He went on to teach philosophy at the Universities of Halle and Jena on the 16th of April 1734, at the University of Wittenberg, he defended his dissertation, De Humanae Mentis Apatheia (On the Impassivity of the Human Mind), in which Amo maintains that (1) the mind does not sense material things, nor does it (2) contain the faculty of sensing. He contributed to the philosophical dialogues of his era.
Emerita Quito, one of the Philippine’s greatest philosophers, dedicated her life to the realm of ideas. She achieved the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques — France’s highest academic decoration — in 1984 and was honored as the Philippine’s most outstanding educator a year later. She mastered six languages, was a superb writer and her 1969 dissertation “The Notion of Participatory Freedom in Philosophy of Louis Lavelle” is the first work written by a Filipino to be published by the Universite de Fribourg.
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet, and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and “ethnophilosophy” (the study of indigenous philosophical systems). As a professor of theology, he carried out wide research into the oral history, traditions, and literature of Rwanda, and authored several books on the subject, both in French and Kinyarwanda.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan writer and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children’s literature. Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Joe Louis Clark is the former principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey. Clark gained public attention in the 1980s for his unconventional and controversial disciplinary measures as the principal of Eastside High.
