culture

In theory, I can understand why Madonna was asked to pay tribute to Prince at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, airing Sunday. When it comes to stars of a certain era—specifically the mid-1980s—there was a trinity: Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson. No stars could command their level of fame. No other acts at the time…

Empire is back, baby! The so-so season rebounded with a jaw-dropping finale that warrants an OMG meter. Let’s go! This episode, “Past Is Prologue,” picks up three weeks later. Frank Gathers’ daughter, Freda Gatz, found out that her mentor Lucious was responsible for her dad’s death in prison. She shot at him, but Jamal ended…

Last week, NBC News ran an op-ed from Danielle Moodie-Mills, a very smart sista whose stuff you should be reading, titled “Does the Revolution Begin With a Free Black Child?” In the piece, she identifies the sartorial and behavioral eccentricities of young black celebrities—including Jaden Smith, Willow Smith and Zendaya Coleman—as indicators of a growing…

With its new series, Inside the Label, BET has put its own spin on the music-genre series popularized by VH1’s Behind the Music and TV One’s Unsung by spotlighting the business and creative synergy behind the music that so many of us love. To kick off its first installment, the docuseries looked to Uptown Records,…

It was definitely a major coup for Johnson C. Smith University, one of the nation’s HBCUs, to snag Oprah Winfrey as its commencement speaker. And she certainly delivered with down-to earth wisdom, her own inspirational stories and lessons from leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Maya Angelou. On a sunny Sunday morning, Winfrey told…

First comes love, then comes marriage—and everyone knows what happens after that. Children are the expected outcome of matrimony. Now that gay marriages are legal, the kids of their unions are subject to even more scrutiny, on top of the years of criticism from socially conservative groups like Focus on the Family and Americans for…

The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination survey found that, as compared with the population at large, the 700,000 transgender or gender-nonconforming citizens of the United States are four times as likely to earn less than $10,000 a year (pdf); they’re twice as likely to be unemployed; 47 percent of them were fired, not hired, or were denied…

If you’ve already seen Captain America: Civil War and have even a passing familiarity with King T’Challa of Wakanda, aka the Black Panther, you know that the director and writers didn’t s—t the bed with the character’s introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As the first meaningful black character in the MCU (Anthony Mackie is…