culture
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Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels Built Careers on Black Women Stories but Trade in Misogynoir
Did they use us just to lose us? Recent comments from Hollywood mega producers Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels have raised eyebrows about the ways they use gender and class privilege to distance themselves from the very communities from which they come. And they do this all while leveraging patriarchal notions of economic achievement to…
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For New Showrunner Erica Shelton Kodish, Being Mary Jane Is Personal
Editor’s note: Because of President Barack Obama’s farewell address, Being Mary Jane will air at 10 p.m. ET on Jan. 10 and return to its regular 9 p.m. ET schedule next week. When it was announced that husband-and-wife creative duo Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil had scored a new development deal and would be…
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Get Away From Reality With These 5 Inauguration Day Escapes
We can’t escape the reality that Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. And although the last few months have felt like the end of the world as we know it, we can literally escape watching, hearing about or even giving a second thought to the Trump inauguration in Washington,…
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What's Ailing Bishop Eddie Long?
I’m concerned about Bishop Eddie Long. In August of 2016, Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, went viral after video showed that he’d lost an alarming amount of weight. “People are asking, ‘Bishop, what happened to all of you?’” he said on a video posted to Facebook that has since been taken…
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Black LGBT Ministers Speak Out About Kim Burrell, Shirley Caesar
The community is still reeling after a silent churchgoer put Kim Burrell’s violently homophobic sermon on blast for the world to see. Burrell’s tirade—which featured vulgar remarks about gay and lesbian sex and a warning that they would “die in 2017”—led Ellen DeGeneres to cancel the scheduled talk show performance of the gospel singer’s song…
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Unique Views Podcast, Episode 25: Here Comes the Hotepper
Eyes back! Did you miss me? That’s right—the granddaddy of them all, your favorite light-skin’s favorite light-skin, is back, and I don’t have long to be here because surely Patti LaDanielle, aka Mrs. Idris Elba, aka Danielle Young, is going to find another way to try to cancel me out with her Diana Ross-Beyoncé antics.…
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Reclaiming My Body During the Month of My Rapist’s Birth
January is usually a time of celebration. It’s a time when people can revisit goals from the previous year, create new ones, craft vision boards and determine our course for the year, all while anticipating some unexpected hurdles along the way. I, too, can always appreciate how important celebrating the new year is—a time with…
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Check Out Black Brilliance 360, a Web Series Delivering Real Talk by and for Black Men
Negative images of black men are easy enough to find in American culture, the kinds of images that label them as “thugs” or criminals. But a new web series called black brilliance 360, which launched this week, is out to flip the narrative on who black men are and what they’re really about. Produced by…