In a series of bite-size videos posted to Teen Vogue’s Snapchat account, 17-year-old Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg revealed that she is a “black bisexual woman” who is on a mission to encourage young girls and women everywhere to embrace their true identity, “no matter what you’re being told.”  “As someone who identifies as a…

We know that Valentine’s Day isn’t for a few weeks, but when a man proclaims that he’s “found the absolute, unequivocally right person for me,” that ought to get some attention. Especially if that man is BET co-founder Bob Johnson, the first African-American billionaire. Johnson has become engaged to Lauren Wooden, a 36-year-old doctoral student.…

MTV plays too much. There’s a photo up on the network’s Instagram account that photoshopped a photo of Michelle Obama into a Destiny’s Child photo. The first lady replaces Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams. “Michelle was always my favorite Destiny’s Child,” the caption reads. The post originally appeared on the Instagram page for SaintHoax—a self-described…

Mara Brock Akil’s interview during Chicago Ideas Week, recently posted to YouTube, began pretty normally. She described how she got her start in screenwriting. Akil, a The Root 100 honoree and the mastermind behind hit TV shows like Girlfriends, The Game and Being Mary Jane, went to journalism school but soon found that she wanted…

Janet Jackson is reportedly getting tests done to determine if she has throat cancer, Yahoo! reports. Remember that Jackson recently postponed her Unbreakable World Tour and put out a statement in October saying that she had to rest her vocal cords. Then, in December, she posted this on Facebook: “I need you to know, I…

There are a few things that are very, very promising about this new musical series The Get Down, which will chronicle the goings-on of a group of South Bronx teenagers in 1970s New York City as they dabble in the elements that gave birth to hip-hop. One, it’s an original series of Netflix—the same online video…

Lifetime recently released an extended trailer of its Toni Braxton Unbreak My Heart biopic that’s coming out later in January. It’s no secret that Braxton, one of the queens of R&B soul, has had a storied journey to the top of the charts and has endured a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. Here…

Idris Elba is becoming a veteran right before our eyes. It seems like just yesterday he burst onto the scene playing the sexy and complicated Stringer Bell in The Wire.  His recent video interview with the New York Times allowed him to reflect on some of his most significant roles. “I consider every character my…

A large chunk of the interview that Serena Williams recently conducted with the United Kingdom’s The Times Magazine is inaccessible to nonsubscribers, but a few more excerpts from the chat got published online. And it’s worth screaming from the mountaintops about.  There’s nothing better than hearing Williams say that she’s well-aware of the criticism she sometimes…

Nearly everyone with a non-Anglican-sounding or -looking surname can relate to the dread you sometimes feel when someone asks you what your name is with the intent of repeating it back to you. Same when a teacher butchers your name during roll call. For more of black Twitter, check out The Chatterati on The Root and follow The Chatterati…