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He Wants to Marry Me, but He Doesn’t Want to Buy an Engagement Ring
My boyfriend wants to get married but doesn’t want to buy an engagement ring. Money isn’t an issue. He has a good job, a home and a luxury car. He wants simple gold bands. I want a diamond ring. He thinks a diamond is a waste of money and the industry is a scam. The…
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How Do I Decode Slave Records?
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Feb. 13, 2013. For many African Americans the paper trail back to your ancestral origins hits a wall once you reach the slavery era. During the hunt for information about my great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, who was born into slavery in 1819, we were able to find her…
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Shaming Angela Simmons for Her Pregnancy Shows How Screwed Up We Are When It Comes to Sex
For weeks, bloggers and social media viewers speculated about the pregnancy status of Angela Simmons—fashion designer, reality-TV star and daughter of the rap legend known as Rev. Run. It’s not an uncommon conversation, and happens to almost every celebrity with a newly announced engagement (Simmons announced hers last month) or who appears on a red…
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Columbia University Student Nayla Kidd Is Courageous, Not Selfish or Crazy
Earlier this month, a Columbia University engineering student, Nayla Kidd, 19, was reported missing after she didn’t show up for her final exams at the Ivy League school in New York City. The story made national news. After a citywide (wo)man hunt—and terrifying her friends and family—Kidd was found in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she had…
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Black Don’t Crack, but You Can Still Get Skin Cancer
The summer sun is coming, and boy, how we do love it. We love to bask in it. We love to play in it. And our brown skin protects us from its harmful rays. Or does it? Throughout generations, we’ve probably heard that because of the melanin in our skin, we don’t need sunscreen or…
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Madonna Claps Back at BET for Its Dig After Her Prince Tribute
With bated breath we all waited for Madonna to do a befitting tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson, her “contemporary,” at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards. But even before the Material Girl hit the stage, there were (legitimate) gripes that black women, whom the recently departed pop icon championed his entire life, were excluded from the…
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Native American Activist and Prisoner Leonard Peltier Asks Obama for Clemency
In 1977 Native American activist Leonard Peltier was put behind bars, where he has remained in federal custody ever since, for the murder of two FBI agents. But he hasn’t given up on being released: A petition for clemency was sent to the White House in late March, according to the New York Daily News.…
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No, Big Boi, Maple Syrup Cannot Cure Cancer—and Yes, You Sound Like a Sexist
Atlien rapper Big Boi, one-half of seminal rap duo Outkast, took a bit of dragging on Twitter this weekend after he posted a meme on “baby mamas” that smacked of sexist gibberish. And then he retweeted a post that said, “Maple syrup can kill cancer.” But let’s start with the real dumbness first. The first tweet,…
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Missing Ivy League Student Tells Why She ‘Disappeared’
Nayla Kidd, the Columbia University sophomore whose disappearance during finals at Columbia University went viral and scared mothers everywhere, was found by police more than two weeks after she seemingly vanished into thin air. It turned out that Kidd, who hails from Lexington, Ky., and was majoring in engineering and social science at the school,…
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TV Review: Did We Really Need a Roots Remake? No, but …
I vividly recall the original iteration of the TV miniseries Roots. It was January 1977 and I was 17. As with most young people that age, my life was rapidly growing independent of my parents, who were increasingly consumed by the vagaries of their workplaces. Yet when the series debuted, it was must-see TV in…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
