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Everything but the Burden: Why We’re Done Getting Mad Over Makeup
Here we go again: Another day, another blackface makeup tutorial. Cue the moral outrage … and another horrible human goes viral. Today’s transgressor is @notcatart, a Russian-speaking makeup hacker who claims to “love skin of all colors”—which likely inspired this idiocy, after he apparently ran out of other looks and cultures to imitate. Of course,…
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Winged Victory: The Victoria’s Secret Runway Got More Colorful This Year … but Is It Enough?
“I’m rooting for everybody black.” Issa Rae’s now-famous quote from the 2017 Emmys is the gift that keeps on giving. Case in point: Now, in the season of giving, it was the exact phrase that came to my mind while watching the 2017 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which aired last night on CBS. This year’s…
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‘She’s Gotta Have It’ … but Do We?
I remember the first time I saw She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s groundbreaking, critically acclaimed and very first “joint,” which premiered in 1986. When it debuted on HBO a year later, I was 12, a latchkey kid, and the parental controls that would lock me out of my parents’ premium channels after school had…
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No Woman Left Behind: Has the Plus-Size Industry Forgotten Its Roots?
“I think I’m literally the biggest, blackest model at IMG,” plus-size phenom Precious Lee says plainly, referring to the persistent lack of bodies and skin tones like hers at the world-renowned agency that represents her. In anticipation of another New York Fashion Week, Lee joined a bevy of models of varying races and sizes to…
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Dancing With the Devils We Know: What the CDC’s New ‘Intimate Partner Violence’ Report Tells Us About the Value of Black Women
The first time I was hit by a man, I was 11. Actually, he wasn’t yet a man; he was 13, an eighth-grader to my sixth. And we weren’t fighting, or even roughhousing. We were rehearsing for a school play when he abruptly asked me to be his girlfriend. Embarrassed and incredulous, I laughed and…
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Hella Homecoming: The Evolution of Insecure
Summer is indisputably a season tailor-made for black joy. ’Tis the season of cookouts, stoop-sitting, rooftop bars, music and food festivals, block parties, hand fans, summer jams and all-white affairs (“Diner en Blanc,” if you’re bougie). And for fans of Issa Rae, it is now also the season to welcome with open and sun-kissed arms…
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The Pathology Behind the Pied Piper: When Will We Stop Protecting Predators?
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly … and R. Kelly will likely be a predator for the rest of his life. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, new allegations surfaced Monday that couldn’t be more fitting or less shocking about the man who calls himself “The Pied Piper of R&B.” Nearly 23 years after…
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Building Without Tools: 4:44 and the Power of Vulnerability, Part 2
What I thought when I met my dad was, “Oh, I’m free to love now.” But it’s like, how are you gonna do it? … You’ve never done this before; no one informed you how to do this. You don’t even have the tools to do it … “Will 4:44 be for black men the…
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Fighting for the Fairy Tale: 4:44 and the Power of Vulnerability
Look, I apologize, often womanizedTook for my child to be bornTo see through a woman’s eyes … It’s the public apology some have been anticipating since the release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, her seemingly confessional opus, almost entirely themed on surviving the pain of infidelity. Aside from being a groundbreaking hit, the visual album inevitably rekindled…
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Strong Enough for a Man, Made (as) a Woman: John McEnroe, Serena Williams and the Erasure of Black Female Excellence
“If [Serena] played the men’s circuit, she’d be, like, 700 in the world.” —John McEnroe “If I were a man, then it wouldn’t be any sort of question.” —Serena Williams John McEnroe cannot be serious. He couldn’t seriously think that he could question or attempt to qualify the greatness of the goddess known as Serena…
