Martin Luther King Jr. Day turned out to be quite eventful for Hollywood. Jada Pinkett Smith announced via video that she would be boycotting this year’s Academy Awards because of the exclusion of black performances in the four major acting categories. This is the second year in a row that black actors have been shut…

Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the PBS series that takes a very deep dive into the ancestry of famous people, never fails to surprise, but in the third episode this season, which airs Tuesday, it shocks. The show focuses on the family histories of actress Maya Rudolph, TV showrunner Shonda Rhimes and…

Scientists recognize that a person’s gender and ancestry play a large role in determining risk for certain diseases. For instance, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), including both Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, and a recent study suggests 36% of those are African American – and the number of diagnosed African Americans…

Editor’s note: Amid growing criticism of this children’s book depicting happy slaves baking a cake for George Washington, publisher Scholastic announced late Jan. 17 that it is pulling the book from retailers. In a statement to the Associated Press, Scholastic said this: While we have great respect for the integrity and scholarship of the author,…

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, I often wonder where are the black men mobilizing against sexual violence against black women? Have we hidden—like the biblical David—away from the eyes of our communities because we are secretly invested in rape culture? Are we afraid because we do not actually know what sexual…