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The Beauty Revolution Will Be Televised
March was a pretty good month to be an Afrobella. Creator Patrice Yursik was the lone black beauty blogger chosen to be featured in Fast Company magazine, which touted her ad network as a top innovator. Then Crème of Nature unveiled its magazine advertising campaign in Essence, Sister 2 Sister and other magazines, featuring her…
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Aaron McGruder, Post-Racial Obama Hater?
In any household where small children live, the rules of engagement must be spelled out and clarified as early and often as possible. ”You know this is HOUSE business right?” my husband often says to our elementary-age kids. As in, don’t bring up Mommy’s sibling beef in front of company. Nobody needs to know about…
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Can Gentrifiers Be Black?
Recently, an affluent couple had their eye on what could be their first home: a lovely corner lot in Hillcrest neighborhood of Washington, D.C. When the previous owners, both Howard graduates, bought the house in 1968, they were the first black family on the block. That was the year that the few remaining white middle-class…
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Is Washington, D.C. Losing Its Funk?
It was just another gig at a D.C. area nightclub, one of several shows the band Suttle Thoughts plays each week, drawing hundreds of young professionals in their 20s and 30s — a self-proclaimed “grown and sexy” crowd. But a club manager stopped the band at the door when he noticed one of the musicians…
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Treme: Cue the Violins
In one early scene of David Simon’s new HBO series, Treme, John Goodman plays an English professor standing on a New Orleans dock, giving an interview to a skeptical BBC TV reporter three months after Hurricane Katrina. When the BBC reporter suggests the city should be allowed to rot, the professor grabs the video camera…
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Freeing the Black Woman’s Body
My husband was excited about his latest find for our kitchen: A pulpy poster of an old ad for Campbell’s “gumbo,” stirred by a plump, black woman in an apron and Aunt Jemima-style bandana. Me? Not so much. The woman could have been one of my grandmothers, who were both descended from slaves and both…
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The Truth About White Masters, Black Mistresses and Touré
Several weeks ago, Gawker reported that while defending interracial marriages, the writer and commentator Touré let out a stream of bizarre tweets that praised raped slaves for seducing their white masters: “Many, many, many of our great grandmothers were raped in slavery. But surely a few of them were loved and surely some … were…
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It 'Helps' to Be White
In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town’s bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy. “What am I doing?” Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. “I must be…
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Twitter’s DIY Journalism
I first realized that our democracy had kicked into another gear last September, when in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speech rallying Congress to pass a health care bill, someone in the U.S. Capitol chamber screamed, “YOU LIE!” Even Obama looked a bit shaken, as I was, sitting in my living room, one eye…
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Heckuva Job, Michael Steele
As the GOP wrapped up its annual winter meeting in Obama’s birthplace this weekend, Chairman Michael Steele had all the bluster of a man on top of the world. When asked by reporters visiting the Hawaiian tropics for the GOP gathering if he plans to run for re-election in 2011, he shot back: “I have…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
