Whether seen or unseen, black women have always had a hand in the American political system.

“It’s never true that *no one* is talking about a thing. It’s often true that *not enough* people are talking about a thing ...,” anti-violence activist Mariame Kaba recently tweeted from her popular @prisonculture account.

If you were a colored girl lucky enough (or “enuf,” as she might write) to grow up on the words and work of playwright, performer and author Ntozake Shange, learning of her death at age 70 on Saturday no doubt left you aching. One of the original conjurers of what we now know as “black girl magic” had left the earthly…

Twitter is apologizing for ignoring the warnings of a woman who appealed to administrators at the social media site to censure a man who appears to have issued an implicit threat on her life. That man turned out to be Cesar Sayoc, who is now in custody for allegedly sending pipe bombs to political figures who had…

Editor’s note: Intersex Awareness Day is October 26.

“The more things change. The more things stay the same.”

A year ago, a line in a piece from Saki Benibo—an assertion also articulated a year before in a tweet from Mela Machinko—inspired me to write something of my own based on that statement. The result (“Straight Black Men Are The White People Of Black People”) was my most read VSB piece of 2017.

They said it wouldn’t last, we had to prove them wrong: Fresh off the historic wave of melanated magnificence on September covers around the world, a new crop of black beauties of is greeting us for October, as epitomized by Janet Jackson on the cover of InStyle magazine’s Beauty Issue.

GirlTrek, the largest national public health nonprofit and movement for black women and girls, continues to offer a balm in a world that clearly still doesn’t recognize the beauty, badness and innovative brilliance of black women.

When Oprah Winfrey represented her home state of Tennessee in the Miss Black America pageant in 1971, she was part of a pioneering group of young women daring to define beauty on their own terms. In fact, the pageant, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, was launched in protest of the Miss America pageant,…

The ceremony won’t be televised until Sept. 9, but on Sunday night at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, N.J., black girl magic was on full display as an array of our established and future icons hit the red carpet for Black Girls Rock! 2018.

While at lunch with a friend a few years ago, she couldn’t locate her lip gloss, so she emptied her purse out on the table to find it. She didn’t have much in there—an iPhone, a wallet, her keys and a small make-up kit. And also, a can of pepper spray.

I walk a lot.

What do multihyphenates Teyana Taylor and Ruth Negga have in common? Aside from both being well known and extremely talented black women, it would seem not much ... except the two were both raised as only children, both worked at their crafts for decades before making a major breakthrough, and each is a style icon in…

It’s only the first day of August, but with a slew of September issues featuring black women on their covers, it’s hard not to look forward to a change of season. We’re still seeing new reveals, but already Slick Woods is in full bloom and beaming on Elle UK, Tiffany Haddish is glowing on Glamour, Rihanna is the first…

Updated Thursday, July 26 2018 at 3:30 p.m. EDT:

If you have spent the slightest amount of time on Black Twitter or Black Instagram since 2015, you have probably come across a tweet or IG post about Ciara.

1. At some point during the two-hour layover at O’Hare International Airport on my trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans last weekend, a supernatural force compelled me to glance up from my laptop and scan the gate around me. There was a shift in the space-time continuum that the universe was attempting to alert me to…

The Statue of Liberty is a metaphor.

Of the myriad factors contributing to my mom’s death, the one I have the least concrete proof for is the one to which I attribute the most blame.