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The Force Don’t Stop: Michael Jackson Musical, MJ, Still Coming to Broadway
It’s back on like popcorn. A musical on the life of Michael Jackson in his heyday originally called Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough, has morphed—like Jackson did many, many times in his life—into MJ. It’s scheduled to hit Broadway in the summer of 2020, according to Playbill. A spokesman for the show announced the…
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Google Trolls BET Awards and the Homeless to (Shadily) Get Dark-Skinned Faces for Pixel 4 Technology
Tech behemoth and Big Brother is Watching purveyor Google—through a third party company—dispatched workers to blackety-black events like the 2019 BET Awards in Los Angeles to get darker-skinned faces for a facial recognition database, but often used skeevy and immoral tactics to do so, according to an explosive report by the New York Daily News.…
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Investigation Finds Fox Studios at Fault for Death of Black Stuntwoman on Set of Deadpool 2
On Aug. 14, 2017, racing pioneer and stuntwoman Joi “SJ” Harris died on the set of 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool 2, crashing into the side of a building in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Harris was performing a stunt as the franchise’s character Domino, played by Zazie Beetz, when she lost control of her motorcycle. More…
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Yesterday in Georgia, Women in Prison Regained Some of Their Dignity
On Tuesday, the Georgia Dignity Act (House Bill 345) went into effect in all women’s prison facilities in Georgia, giving more than 3,800 women locked up in the state access to basic necessities like sanitary napkins, as well as affording them the decency of not being chained while pregnant or giving birth. The bipartisan bill,…
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Full Court Press: NBA Forces Every Franchise to Employ Psychologist, Behavioral Health Specialist for 2019-2020 Season
From Kevin Love to Metta World Peace, Dennis Rodman to DeMar DeRozen, players in the National Basketball Association—past and present—have publicly grappled with mental health issues. And that makes perfect sense, as the men of the NBA assuredly are part of the nearly 44 million Americans who have confronted mental illness in any given year.…
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The Water Dancer: Ta-Nehisi Coates Joined Oprah in Conversation at the Apollo—and We Were There
It was an amazingly candid conversation, punctuated with lots of laughter, black-ass intonations, and responses from the crowd. “I love a talking back audience,” Oprah said, as she and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates presented a salon of sorts at the venerable Apollo Theater last week. The packed audience (which included this writer) was privy to a…
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Harriet A. Washington's A Terrible Thing to Waste Injects a Dose of Hard Truth Into the Conversation About Black Lives
Harriet Washington’s 2007 tome, Medical Apartheid, not only outlined the pervasive use of medical experimentation on black Americans throughout history but circumscribed blacks’ credible distrust of the medical establishment. In fact, a large part of why J. Marion Sims’ statue was removed from New York’s Central Park more than a decade later was because of…
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Meet the New Head of Planned Parenthood: Alexis McGill Johnson Is a Seasoned Soldier in the War for Women’s Reproductive Health
It was mid-August, and just weeks into her new job as acting president/CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of American and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Alexis McGill Johnson was out front, defending the organization from attack. On that day, McGill Johnson said that Planned Parenthood would be pulling out of the Title X program,…
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Peace Is a Lifestyle: Erica Ford’s Peace Mobile Is Healing a Community Affected by Gun Violence, One Ride at a Time
Like fellow Queens, N.Y., native, L.L. Cool J, Erica Ford has been here for years. She’s been in these streets. Always a standout, with gray tresses since she was in her 20s, Ford has long been at the intersection of hip-hop and activism. At turns playful and stern, like a drill sergeant, sis is serious…
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At Least 100 Bahamians Forced Off Boat Headed to U.S. Because They Didn’t Have Visas
Adding to what is undoubtedly a deeply traumatic experience—losing one’s home and upending any sense of safety and normalcy—many evacuated Bahamians bound for Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian were told they could not enter the United States without proper paperwork, and reportedly as many as 130—women, men, children—disembarked a ship. WSVN reporter Brian…
