culture
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Black People, Please Stop Saying Straightening Our Hair Is Appropriation
Appropriation is definitely a buzzword of the moment. Seems like every few weeks, we get the chance to start pointing fingers at one celeb or another. And with Halloween around the corner, you know the culture vultures won’t disappoint in turning various cultures into costumes for their amusement. The more I write and speak on…
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New Prince Album Coming in November
It has been exactly seven months since the world lost the Purple One, otherwise known as Prince. In memoriam, his music, both classic and unreleased, is being repackaged and reissued to a nation of fans still in disbelief. According to the Los Angeles Times, Warner Bros. and NPG Records have announced a 2017 release of…
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Finding the Power in Black Voices
This traumatic election year has brought America’s long-standing violence toward black people to the fore. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s explicit racism—and the thousands of people who want to give him the highest seat in the land—boldly underscores America’s investment in white supremacy and oppression. Things could get worse. But I also have to hope…
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The Top 7 Moments We Did Not See Coming on This Week’s HTGAWM
You can’t touch Annalise (or her crew), and after another intense episode of How to Get Away With Murder, we discovered seven moments that reveal why you can’t touch them. You can dive into the recap, but the short answer? You can’t even come close to them because so much of what they do comes straight up out…
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50 Years Later: A Look Back at the Black Panther Party
Fifty years ago, in October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobbly Seale had a brilliant idea. Initially conceived as a way to protect the black community against the oppressive presence and indiscriminate violence of the police in Oakland, Calif., the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense evolved into a organization that advocated for revolutionary black…
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The NAACP Charter School Ban: Good Intentions Take a Bad Turn
Based on its century-long mission and in-the-trenches fight for social justice, it certainly goes without saying that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is an organization built on good intentions and good causes. It’s one of the few reliably steady organizations African Americans can depend on when freedoms are compromised by generations…
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Johnnetta B. Cole Is a Force of Nature
Johnnetta Betsch Cole, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, turned 80 years old Wednesday, and the stunning educator, humanitarian, anthropologist and mentor to many says it’s wonderful to turn what she calls “40 years old times two.” “I’m so conscious of what I would call a disconnect between the very words ‘80 years…
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Black Folk Hate White Tears and Blatant Racism More Than Charter Schools
To the chagrin of charter advocates, on Friday the national board of the NAACP ratified an earlier resolution (pdf) that called for a moratorium on charter schools. Given the ample sources of opposition to charter schools, as well as mixed results, we should only be surprised that it’s taken this long for a major black civil…
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The Price We Paid: Race, Reparative Justice and the Drug War [Retracted]
RETRACTED (6/12/18): This story has been removed because we have discovered it was in breach of our editorial standards. If you’d like to know more, you can read an editor’s note here. A cached version of the story is available here for transparency.