culture

Am I my brother’s keeper? Clemson tailback Ray Ray McElrathbey lives his life by answering yes to that biblical question every day. So, two years ago with his mother battling a drug addiction and his absentee father crippled by an equally self-sabotaging gambling affliction, the question of what to do with his then 11-year-old brother…

Perhaps one of the truest and most tragic lines in American film is spoken by the character Yellow Mary in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust(1991) when she sadly declares that “the rape of the colored woman is as common as fish in the sea.” As a rape survivor, I speak on behalf of the…

The New York Times recently reported on the increasing popularity of “Slum tourism.” For North-American and European travelers who want more from their vacations than beaches and monuments, group tours of Brazilian favelas or Indian shanty towns offer access to some of the poorest pockets of the developing world. The article explored some of the…

I was listening to Erykah Badu’s new CD, New AmErykah and I had one consistent thought, “This is genius.” Listening to New AmErykah, I was reminded of the powerful book, Black Genius edited by Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor and Regina Austin. Published in 2000, on the brink of a new century, the book…

I witnessed something truly astonishing on Monday night: a public discussion of black women’s experiences of sexual violence at the hands of black men. It was an intergenerational group of black men and women, gay and straight, survivors and perpetrators, all grappling with the legacy of rape and race. The experience was unusual because black…

As we head down the final stretch of the NBA season, a time honored ritual will begin, calls to fix the playoff system. Not fix as in Tim Donaghy the crooked referee, but correct so that what is likely to happen this year won’t happen again. Everyone who follows the sport closely—and at this point…

Here’s the wonderful thing about Mos Def’s new film, Be Kind Rewind: I can’t remember a single triumphant moment—and there are several—when one character drives the scene. Solos are left for the emotional valleys; the peaks come in ensemble. That’s the film’s organizing idea, that collectivity fosters not just strength, but joy. It’s an awfully…

Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette Yield: 4 Servings You bled my momma! You bled my poppa! (But you won’t bleed ME!) — as echoed over Earth Wind, and Fire’s music in the 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Last weekend I was in Los Angeles filming an episode for “Mario’s Greenhouse,” a television…

I went on Match dot com not to find someone but to rid myself of silly romantic illusions. It worked exquisitely. Remember last year when that film clip was making the rounds of the Internet, the one about a black man taking his white girlfriend to his ex-wife’s house and then sticking around to deliver…

Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with learning and those who pursue it. We are a nation that has made free public education a birthright, but we pay teachers the lowest salaries of any group of college-educated professionals. In the last two presidential elections, we’ve chosen a man of less-than-mediocre intellect whose thinking is…