culture
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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…
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Watch: You Will Get Your Whole Life With This Hidden Figures Red Carpet
Hidden Figures is the story of the impact black women had on NASA’s space explorations, and it hits theaters nationwide Friday. The film focuses on three black women who worked in the math department at NASA in the 1950s: Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson. And even though this movie is based on a true…
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Review: Hidden Figures Brilliantly Shines Light on 3 Black Women Who Helped NASA Reach New Heights
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that the already-celebrated film Hidden Figures is coming to a theater near you as it reaches its nationwide release Friday. Based on a book by the same name, Hidden Figures is a historical drama set in 1960s Hampton, Va., that chronicles the personal and professional lives…
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Hair-Care Pioneer Miko Branch Is Teaching Millennials Do’s and Don’ts of Running Business
Miko Branch, co-founder and CEO of the multimillion-dollar Miss Jessie’s natural-hair-care line, is hoping the tale of her success will inspire others who might want to follow in her footsteps. “It’s more like the cherries on top, to be able to stand in my shoes and know where I came from, and know I had…
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Why Were My Freedmen Ancestors Split Between Tribes?
Dear Professor Gates: My ancestor Billy Postoak (aka Taylor and possibly Perryman) was born about 1820 in Alabama and was a slave of Taylor Postoak (Creek Indian). He married a Lizzie Smith and they had a son named Isaac Nivens (born about 1840-1842) in Alabama. A slave schedule shows Isaac was a slave of Cherokee…