The crowd wanted a party and His Purpleness delivered. With a nostalgic salute to the 1980s, the Afro-shaking, guitar-riffing Prince showed up in New Orleans and showed out for the 20th anniversary of the Essence Music Festival. He tore up the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with hit after hit, and the capacity crowd of 50,000 sang along…

A SiriusXM spokesman Friday announced the firing of a co-host of the Opie & Anthony radio show, citing “racially charged” and incendiary tweets about a confrontation in New York City earlier in the week, the Associated Press reports. Shock jock Anthony Cumia was fired late Thursday, SiriusXM spokesman Patrick Reilly told the AP. He described…

A woman captured on video racially insulting another woman was confronted by other passengers on a Central Coast & Newcastle train in Australia, according to video uploaded by YouTube user Kareem Abdul. The confrontation began when the older woman apparently turned aggressive “toward a group of kids 12 and under who wouldn’t give up their seats,”…

At least 15 people, including two teens, were shot in Chicago as the Fourth of July holiday weekend began, according to NBC Chicago.  The first fatality among the shootings took place shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side in what police suspect was a drug deal…

A few weeks ago while attending the American Black Film Festival in New York City, I witnessed the short film Muted. Written by Brandi Ford, featuring Grey’s Anatomy star Chandra Wilson and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and directed by Rachel Goldberg, Muted was only 20 minutes long, but the offering sat on my chest like a lump of steel for days afterward.  In the…

Editor’s note: This column was originally published May 3, 2013. A common problem that people encounter when trying to trace their roots on a particular parent’s side using DNA testing is that the parent is dead or not available to them. The reader below has encountered this roadblock, but there are ways around it. I…

Apologists for the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling this week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores are fond of pointing out that the arts and crafts retail chain includes 16 forms of contraception under its health insurance plan and excludes only four. And by framing this as corporate benevolence, Hobby Lobby and the court have effectively opened…

Black thug. Welfare queen. Token black friend. Crazy black woman. Vigilante slave. We’re well-aware that these stereotypes have flooded big and small screens with shortsighted portrayals of the collective black experience. Actor Larenz Tate sat down with HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill on Tuesday and discussed how stereotypical black roles are still overrepresented in…

Minister King Samir Shabazz, an outspoken black supremacist and New Black Panther Party Philadelphia-chapter leader, is sitting in a Mercer County, N.J., jail cell after police arrested him on gun charges—his second gun arrest in a year, reports Philly.com. Police arrested Shabazz, 42, who was born Maruse Heath, in Trenton, N.J., while serving an outstanding…