culture
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Rachel Howzell Hall Crafts a New Type of Hero in Her Detective Mysteries
The detective-mystery genre is dominated by male heroes—white male heroes, to be precise. There is Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Elmore Leonard and Dashiell Hammett’s leading men. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. And many, many more. The few black faces we have in…
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#AirbnbWhileBlack: It’s Time to Seek Alternatives. Here Are a Few
The moment Charles Hunt arrived in Rome, he planned to drop his luggage at his Airbnb and go on to explore the ancient city. Except, after a series of six email exchanges with the host to finalize accommodations and pay for his stay, the host suddenly said the room was no longer available. Out of…
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How Dating Sites, Thanks to Princeton Review, Know More About You Than You Do
When I was growing up, there were always three places that my parents said were great for meeting your future girlfriend, wife or significant other: church, work and, of course, school. Our church attendance had waned in my late high school years, and I worked at a bagel bakery—so college seemed the mostly likely option…
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A 1st Look at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Race can be a polarizing topic in a lot of ways, but curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture are expecting the new addition on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to bring people together. Scheduled to open in September, the museum’s exhibits will tell the stories of blacks in…
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Can You Have Good Sex When You Can’t See Your Genitals?
My boyfriend and I weigh almost 560 pounds together. We have a great time exercising and cooking together, but neither one of us ever read anything about sex when people can’t really see their genitals. He has a hidden penis that I have never seen. It is buried under his fat stomach. Sex is such…
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Ser Negro Es Hermoso Campaign Seeks to Teach Afro-Colombians That Black Is Beautiful
When foreigners think of the country of Colombia, usually visions of drug-cartel bosses and Latin beauty queens with olive skin come to mind. Few foreigners know just how multicultural, and black, the country is. Colombia has the second-largest population of people of African descent in the Americas after Brazil—at least 5 million, according to the…
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Here Is the Darth Becky Mount Rushmore
It’s been a few weeks since Beyoncé turned the entire Internet into a collection of underqualified Easy Rawlinses—theorizing, guessing, hypothesizing and attempting to deduce the identity of Becky With the Good Hair. (The verdict? Maybe it was Rachel Ray. Maybe it was a MacGuffin. And maybe it was just Beyoncé’s new way of saying Sasha…
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Scandal Recap: That’s My Girl
Scandal’s season 5 finale kicks off with Jake Ballard calmly poisoning his new father-in-law. Now, if you watch enough Scandal, you’ll start to become numb to murder. In fact, murder will start to seem like an obvious option. I can’t count the number of times I’ve yelled at the screen, “Just kill him already!” Especially as it…
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Artist Turns Racist Flirtations on Tinder Into Compelling Look at Race and Sex
Over the weekend I swung by the 156 Art Fair, an annual exhibition of African art at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, N.Y. Among the many strong presentations on display, Phoebe Boswell’s Stranger in the Village stood out. In April 2015 Boswell, a biracial Kenyan woman currently living in London, was temporarily situated in Gothenburg, Sweden,…
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Showing Up Late for Concerts Isn’t a Lauryn Hill Thing
I’ve been to more concerts in my lifetime than I can remember. But I can tell you which were distinctly the best and worst that I’ve attended. The best was in early 1999, during my senior year of high school. I went to see the Roots at the State Theatre (now the Fillmore) in Detroit.…