Three Bright Black Science Students and Contestants ...

[finnbow]

... hassled and undermined by deplorables.

Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner and Bria Snell should only be proud this week.

The 17-year-old women, all juniors at Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., created a simple way using copper shards, drinking straws and filter floss — simple, though I am not smart enough to understand it — to demonstrate how to purify water in school drinking fountains that may be contaminated by lead.

They tested and even tasted the water. Their rudimentary purifier works.

The three friends became one of eight teams that are finalists in a NASA competition to apply space technologies to earthly challenges.

And by the way: The students from Banneker are the only team among the finalists who are all African-American women.

At a time when they should have heard nothing but accolades and encouragement, some unidentified people on 4chan, an Internet posting site where racists and homophobes have posted anonymous nonsense, began to put up bigoted comments about the young women. There is no need to quote those comments here. The trolls suggested ways to hack the NASA voting system to prevent the young women from winning.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/05/60855...ame-the-trolls

Two of the girls want to be doctors, the other a biomedical engineer. I wonder how their aspirations compare to the deplorables who insulted and tried to undermine them.