culture

Black Americans can bask in the glow of a newfound progressiveness this Black History Month. And our first black president also happens to be our first African-American president. Black and African-American—I can’t help dwelling on those two descriptors and the weight they carry in defining us. I’m brown, thank you. But I’ll settle for black.…

The news that Clark Atlanta University is laying off 70 faculty members and getting rid of P.E. is truly alarming for a number of reasons. For one, in the so-called post-racial moment, many have been questioning the need for HBCUs anyway. We sincerely hope the enrollment freefall experienced in recent years by many HBCUs and…

NPR’s Farai Chideya sounds off about the cancellation of her popular radio show News & Notes. “I’m not convinced that any one of the theories about why our show was cancelled holds up,” she tells blogger Eisa Ulen. Chideya left the show right before inauguration, because, she says, NPR denied her the chance to cover the historic event. News…

Watching last night’s live performance of the monster hit “Swagger Like Us” at the Grammy Awards featuring the 9-months pregnant M.I.A., Lil Wayne, Kanye, Jay-Z and soon-to-be-locked-down rapper T.I., it’s clear to The Buzz who had the biggest balls on stage. Watching the Brit-by-way-of Sri Lanka’s performance last night, which happened to fall on her…

Jamal, a gay black man, was diagnosed 10 years ago with HIV. He can’t hold a job, battles drug addiction and suffers from serious depression. He has no car, and public transportation isn’t an option without help. Years of poor health, mental illness, lack of family support and the daily grind of coping with the…

God really does watch over babies and fools. It was around this time eight years ago when I took my first HIV test. I was 31 years old, and it was just before I got married. My wife and I wanted to make sure that we were both HIV-negative. It seemed like the right thing…

The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores some of the arguments in his new book Lincoln on Race and Slavery and the related PBS series “Looking for Lincoln.” On the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator’s birth Gates tackles the important and troubling question “Was Lincoln a racist?” And there is no end of interest…

By now you’ve gotten tagged, oh, 6 million times. The Buzz must admit we’re only mere mortals, and even we have succumbed to the “25 Random Things About Me” Facebook craze in the same herd-following way we signed up for Facebook in the first place. In the course of these taggings, we’ve learned more than…

The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs — the most since December 1974 — and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Economists had forecast a loss of 540,000 jobs and a unemployment rate of 7.5…

NBA fans, meet your new superstar, Kevin Durant. If that last sentence seems a little strange, then it’s because Kevin Durant has been presented to basketball fans as a superstar for two years now. He was Player of the Year in college, won Rookie of the Year last season. From Day 1 in the NBA,…