This past weekend marked the beginning of Ramadan. Nearly one-fourth of the world will observe the annual fast and 8 million Muslims in America will abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset during the holy month. A grueling task at any time of the year, Ramadan this year will be especially daunting during…

I might be Maya Peterson’s biggest fan. Don’t know her name just yet? You should. She’s the prep school graduate everyone’s buzzing about for her bold, if a bit misguided, way of tackling sexism and racism at her New Jersey high school.  Maya, a black-Latina lesbian, was elected class president at the very elite and…

The invitations to our annual Fourth of July barbecue have gone out (did you get yours?), and there are a couple of people who didn’t make the list this year. Don’t get us wrong: It’s not that we dislike these individuals. We just think that their time would be better served tending to more important…

William Walters, grand dragon of the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire, aka the Ku Klux Klan, got the boot from his five-year post on a neighborhood watch in Philadelphia earlier this year after city officials learned that he was passing out KKK recruitment literature while on the job, reports Philadelphia magazine. “We…

Another day, another story about racial profiling—inspiring outrage from some, resignation from others and disbelief from those still hanging on to the hope that such behavior is a rarity in America. As first reported by the Michigan Citizen, Portia Roberson—the attorney in charge of Detroit’s Civil Rights and Justice Department—was approached by police officers as…

New York City subway acrobats—watch out, you’re next. The impromptu, in-your-face pole dancers who flip, somersault and breakdance within inches of passengers’ faces on the nation’s busiest transit system have accounted for 240 misdemeanor arrests related to their acrobatics this year by the New York City Police Department, compared with less than 40 such arrests…

I swear, this is not another “I miss Lauryn Hill” article, even though, yes, I do miss her output. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (and, to a lesser degree, the Unplugged double album) changed my life for the better. But as often as Hill is cited for being the greatest female rapper of all time…

Throughout our history, black women across the country have felt the enduring sting of men controlling their reproductive freedom, infringing on their right to have or not have a child and access to birth control, and using religion as a basis for that control. A long history of denial of the right of black women…