In light of Sheryl Sandberg’s campus initiative to promote her best-seller, Lean In, bell hooks, in a piece at the Feminist Wire, is critical of Sandberg’s “simplistic description of the feminist movement.” Sandberg’s brand of feminism, she argues, flies in the face of the work that so many scholars have done to clarify and strengthen the equality for women movement. …

In a piece at Ebony magazine, Jamilah Lemieux says she’s finally getting the message that some white people have been sending black people for years regarding racially insensitive Halloween costumes: They don’t care about the history; they just want to do what they want to do. So stop trying to create a teachable moment — or…

It’s high time that black Americans steer clear of any store that racially profiles, especially Barneys and Macy’s, the Rev. Al Sharpton argues at the Huffington Post.  As the recently reported incidents of profiling, interrogation and detainment of customers at Barneys and Macy’s have showcased, large entities from the private sector not only blatantly discriminate against us, they also…

Michaela Angela Davis at Jezebel joins the flock of literary giants parsing 12 Years a Slave by examining the complicated relationship that was created during slavery and still persists between black women and white women. Patsey and the Mistress Epps personify Black and White American women’s painful slave legacy. American slavery was an insidious economic institution devised…

12 Years a Slave differs from traditional black slave films in featuring nuanced black voices, Wesley Morris observes in Grantland. It’s one of the first slave films to discredit the idea that “black stories are nothing without a white voice to tell them that black people can’t live without the aid of white ones,”  Morris writes.  It’s…