Black thug. Welfare queen. Token black friend. Crazy black woman. Vigilante slave. We’re well-aware that these stereotypes have flooded big and small screens with shortsighted portrayals of the collective black experience. Actor Larenz Tate sat down with HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill on Tuesday and discussed how stereotypical black roles are still overrepresented in…

Minister King Samir Shabazz, an outspoken black supremacist and New Black Panther Party Philadelphia-chapter leader, is sitting in a Mercer County, N.J., jail cell after police arrested him on gun charges—his second gun arrest in a year, reports Philly.com. Police arrested Shabazz, 42, who was born Maruse Heath, in Trenton, N.J., while serving an outstanding…

William Walters, grand dragon of the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire, aka the Ku Klux Klan, got the boot from his five-year post on a neighborhood watch in Philadelphia earlier this year after city officials learned that he was passing out KKK recruitment literature while on the job, reports Philadelphia magazine. “We…

New York City subway acrobats—watch out, you’re next. The impromptu, in-your-face pole dancers who flip, somersault and breakdance within inches of passengers’ faces on the nation’s busiest transit system have accounted for 240 misdemeanor arrests related to their acrobatics this year by the New York City Police Department, compared with less than 40 such arrests…

The South Carolina state trooper who reportedly threatened to use a Taser on Cincinnati Bengals defensive end Sam Montgomery during a traffic stop on June 25, despite his efforts to cooperate, was suspended by the South Carolina Department of Public Safety on Thursday, the Associated Press reports. The conduct by the trooper, whom AP identifies…

Friday morning, Tamron Hall, the Today show’s first African-American female co-host, unexpectedly revealed her natural kinks and curls on national television. After the unveiling, the news program—in an “I can’t believe they’re actually doing this” move—polled its audience regarding whether Hall, 43, should stick with her natural look on-air. Somewhat surprisingly and thankfully—given white America’s…

Talk about being a history-maker. Jabari Parker, the 6-foot-8-inch Duke power forward who was selected second overall in the first round of the 2014 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, joins a small number of African-American Mormons who have played in the NBA, such as Thurl Bailey and Brandon Davies, and is the highest-ranked Asian-Pacific…

“Young African Americans need two more levels of education than their young white counterparts to have the same chance at employment” is the stark conclusion of a new study from Young Invincibles, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that focuses on young Americans. The study, “Closing the Race Gap” (pdf), confirms the timeless adage that as a black…

One associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design wants to make sure Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African-American 17-year-old gunned down in Florida by George Zimmerman in 2012, will be remembered in perpetuity in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Matthew Hincman for years had been eyeing a lamppost as a potential art space before…