Dave Chappelle officially returns to stand-up comedy next week at the Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival in Austin, Texas, in a new 15-city tour presented by the Funny or Die website, the New York Times reports. And he’s got jokes. Mr. Chappelle didn’t just walk away from a $50 million contract [in 2005] and the…

Philadelphia’s public schools will open on time in September after city officials Thursday announced plans to borrow $50 million, the New York Times reports. On Sept. 9, schools will open with minimum staffing and greatly reduced extracurricular activities and other programs. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. had been threatening to delay opening schools if the city…

(The Root) — White feminism’s disregard for black women’s issues is nothing new, and sexism in black power movements from the United States to South Africa is also well documented. So it was no surprise when Twitter exploded on Monday with the #solidarityisforwhitewomen trending topic. Writer Mikki Kendall started the tag in response to the…

(The Root) — “My family is from Sierra Leone, but we do have a legend of sorts. I think it’s true, but because of the civil war that happened there, it would be quite difficult to get information from Sierra Leone. “My grandfather’s father was supposedly a half-Scottish, half-Greek man. It’s not clear how or…

In a piece at The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann turns the spotlight on white privilege through the prism of a new study that finds that as youths, many successful white male entrepreneurs engaged in “aggressive, illicit, risk-taking activities.” Men of color, however, have been saddled with rap sheets for committing the very same crimes, hampering their…

Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, the state’s freshly minted Democratic Senate candidate, is not in line to become the new black leader, argues John McWhorter at Time. His interests are too disparate and too tied to the status quo. The main criticism of Booker seems to be his open embrace of the Powers That Be…

At Salon, Brittney Cooper urges the media and the black community to end unrelenting attacks on black women, following the uproar surrounding the now-pulled “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” video on Russell Simmons’ YouTube network. “With a scarily consistent frequency,” she writes, “black women’s political histories and needs are not only minimized but utterly discounted in…

U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman (R.-Texas) said it’s “silly” for the Missouri chapter of the NAACP to call for a federal probe into an incident involving a man who wore a mask of President Barack Obama during a controversial performance last weekend at the state fair, Fox News reports. “A rodeo clown is really a nominal…

The strain of poverty is traumatizing enough, but the scars can be lasting and even deadly when it occurs early in life, the Huffington Post reports. Whites in the U.S. live about five years longer than blacks because of socioeconomic factors, not genetics, the report shows. And the stress elevates levels of stress hormones and…