culture
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Everything You Need to Know About the Retrial of the Cop Who Killed Sam Dubose and Is Getting Away With It
Hamilton County, Ohio, Judge Leslie Ghiz delayed jury selection Tuesday in the retrial of Ray Tensing, the police officer who shot Sam Dubose during a 2015 traffic stop. After Ghiz severely restricted media access to the trial, an Ohio appeals court granted a request filed by the Associated Press and other news outlets to…
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LaKeisha, Where Art Thou? The Case for ‘Black Sounding’ Names
Recently I played host to my niece’s 5th-birthday party. It was a backyard paint-themed affair where all the babies were dressed like pint-size Picassos in smocks and berets and hyped up on confectioners’ sugar. It was somewhere between the dance-off and “Red light, green light” that I realized something. There were no Keishas here. There…
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Congrats, Lifetime Made a Michael Jackson TV Movie That Was Not Terrible
I thought the Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland movie was going to be some trash. With all due respect to Lifetime, the network gave us the horrible Aaliyah biopic and the not-as-awful-but-close-enough movie about the life of Whitney Houston. I wouldn’t be surprised if either one of their ghosts was still haunting all of the…
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Videos of Racists Being Racist Go Viral, and Then What?
Roses are red, violets are blue, America is full of racists, what else is new? That was my initial feeling when recently greeted by two videos floating around Al Gore’s Internet featuring two separate instances of overt racism. The other was curiosity over how that loudmouthed woman in Walmart or that wheelchair-bound man who reminded…
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Unlike Most of Y’all, I Like Katy Perry’s New Songs, but …
When I heard Katy Perry’s Migos-featuring single, “Bon Appétit,” I was too busy body rolling to join a lot of y’all in the latest online protest. Likewise, I took a “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news” stance when it came to reports about Perry making jokes about former President Barack Obama. In Saddle Tan…
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LaVar Ball—His Team and His Mouth—Shut Down by Compton, 109-57
Known loudmouth LaVar Ball got his comeuppance from the city of Compton, Calif., on Saturday—and NBA star James Harden was there to see the whole thing. Ball’s AAU basketball team—the Big Ballers, which his oldest son, LaMelo, plays for—got crushed 109-57 by the Compton Magic at the Magic Memorial Day Festival in Southern California, according…
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Black Codes and Dress Codes: Will Black Hair Always Be Against the Rules?
Graduation season is here—that time of year when we get to celebrate academic achievements, watch with anticipation as the graduates move on to life’s next step, and hear about all the students being banned from prom and graduation for dress code violations. As a jolting end to that list, we’re hearing more stories of students…
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Master of None’s Lena Waithe on Coming Out in the ‘Thanksgiving’ Episode: ‘It Was Really Important to Get This Right’
When Master of None’s Lena Waithe shared her coming-out story with the show’s writers’ room, she never thought it would ever end up as an episode, let alone one of the Netflix series’ most memorable episodes to date. “I was just talking about my own struggles coming out to my mother. I didn’t think anything…
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Not Without a Fight: Black Women Are Taking Up Arms to Protect Themselves
Twenty-five-year-old Marchelle Tigner has been a victim, and she refuses to be a victim ever again. “I’m a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, and I feel like what else is there that I could do other than this to impact all these people’s lives and help them and make sure no other woman…
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Tupac’s Godfather, Jamal Joseph, on His Journey From Panther to Political Prisoner to Film Director
Writer, director and activist Jamal Joseph was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. At 16 years old, he was arrested in the Panther 21 case along with Afeni Shakur, the mother of rapper Tupac Shakur. The Panther 21 case was designed to wipe out the New York Black Panther…