culture

Fifteen years ago, we all adored the “Fab Four.” They came at a time that is barely recognizable today. Before Carrie and her crew, before Joan and ’em even stepped on the scene, nearly every black female in America had another set of friends to flock to—Khadijah, Synclaire, Max and Regine. Living Single was the…

While growing up in Houston, Vince Young endured some trials and took some perilous detours on his way to stardom and riches. His mother had her bouts with drug addiction. His Pops was absent, mostly in jail. The streets were calling.  His talent saved him from the statistics.  He surfaced as a college football star and…

I first became interested in President Thomas Jefferson and his famous mountaintop home, Monticello, in third grade, when I read a series of biographies about prominent Americans. The series was just about what one would expect for texts pitched to elementary-school children: cheery and uncomplicated versions of great American lives designed to plant positive feelings…

Adapted from THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO by Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2008 by Annette Gordon-Reed. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. The home that Sally Hemings moved to was just inside the city limits of Paris. The Hôtel de Langeac was right next to the Grille de Chaillot, one of the…

For years, adding MSG to food was about as common, and acceptable, as adding a dash of salt. But as people became more health conscious and gained better access to nutritional information, they began to make the connection between their skull-splitting migraine and the previous night’s Chinese takeout. The discovery of MSG’s unpleasant side effects…

For most of its 200-year history, the art of paper-doll making has not been flattering to black folks. Prior to the mid-1950s, white illustrators and publishers generally drew the rare black paper doll in menial or supporting roles, often as an appendage to a white family. Mimicking popular culture, images of picaninnies, sambos, mammies, butlers…

You can learn a lot when you spend seven years under indictment for child-molestation charges, and then get acquitted at trial. Just ask R. Kelly, who sat down with BET on Tuesday night for his first television interview since he was acquitted of all the charges against him in June. Touré, BET’s lollipop-froed correspondent, gently…

These are interesting times for women of a certain age.Not only has much of the presidential campaign season centered on the concerns of women voters, but Hollywood appears to have discovered us, too. Since last spring, feature film versions of Sex in the City and Mamma Mia! have scored millions at the box office, a development…

Isis strikes a pose. Couture, not commercial. Her face alone is vogue—café au lait, high cheek bones that say high-fashion. Her pouty lips prove to be the perfect accessory to her doe-eyed smile, catching the light at every turn and tilt of the head. Her long legs slice through the air with precision. She is…

To most everyone, the prototypical sufferer is an insecure, sickly-thin, young, white woman who looks in the mirror and sees a fat girl. It is Karen Carpenter, singing the sad songs of the 1970s as she starved herself and finally died in 1983. It is so many Hollywood actresses, splashed across magazine covers, their pretty…