culture
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Who’s the Keeper of Your Mother’s Memories When She Can’t Remember Them?
Now, are you someone I’m supposed to know? She’s nice enough on the phone. Pleasant, even. So pleasant that it could be normal if you wanted to pretend. But then, she’s always been nice, always liked to talk, even if she had nothing to say. This was no different, although these days she has good…
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Nate Moore, the Secret Weapon Behind Marvel’s on-Screen Blackness
Nate Moore has achieved a “marvel” feat of his own: going from reading comics as a kid to landing as executive producer alongside Marvel mastermind Stan Lee himself for the iconic brand’s latest global smash, Captain America: Civil War. While I was in there, I was able, with Nicole Perlman [first woman to write a Marvel…
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In Search of the Truth About James Brown
In 2013 James McBride won the prestigious National Book Award for his novel The Good Lord Bird, which follows a teenage slave who joins abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 rebellion. Prior to that, McBride had authored the best-selling memoir The Color of Water and two works of fiction: Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna.…
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One Woman’s Crusade to Ban the Box on College Applications
There are many ways to stop punishing people with criminal records for crimes for which they have already done the time. One of those ways, about which Vivian Nixon, executive director of the College and Community Fellowship and co-founder of the Education From the Inside Out (EIO) Coalition, is most passionate, is by increasing access…
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20 Things 50-Year-Old Black Men Get to Do Without Giving a Damn
The realization that I’m officially closer to 50 than I am to 18 hit me while I was playing basketball last week. My legs were feeling especially springy, so I decided to actually try to dunk instead of doing the nonchalant, rim-grab, “almost” dunk thing I do to convince people—myself included—that I can still dunk if…
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When Nia Long Told Larry King That J. Cole Wasn’t Too Young, I Lost My Mind
To say that Nia Long is a national treasure is an understatement. Long has been a part of most of our lives since at least the mid-’90s, when she played Beulah “Lisa” Wilkes on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and when a visionary Ice Cube saw fit to cast her in cult classic Friday. Thank…
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My God Too: New Campaign Launched at Morgan State Spotlights LGBTQ Life on HBCU Campuses
“Gender is more than just being a man or a woman. Gender is what you identify as, as a person,” says Damilola Louwole, 21, a senior at Morgan State University in Baltimore. She dresses and identifies as a masculine woman, and says that people don’t understand. The Cambridge, Mass., native also says that at a…
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Scandal Recap: Playing the ‘Trump Card’
Scandal’s presidential election is in full swing, and the candidates drop like flies in this episode, which is appropriately titled, “Trump Card.” On the Republican Side Billionaire bigot Hollis Doyle is leading the Republican field, and Olivia Pope and Abby Whelan have agreed to a cease-fire so they can team up to take Hollis down, but…
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The Real MVP: TV Movie About Wanda Durant’s Life Offers a Powerful Tribute to Single Moms
Superstar Kevin Durant was sniffling, getting teary-eyed and speaking with a cracked voice toward the end of his acceptance speech in 2014 after winning the NBA MVP award. And he hadn’t even mentioned his mother yet. He was talking about his brothers, his friends and his grandmother, thanking them for their love and support as…
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Empire Recap: She’s a Bad Mama Jama
Forget the American Sound Awards—Empire has a new entrant in the “worst parent” competition. Lucious is horrible, but in “The Lyon Who Cried Wolf,” his mama makes him look like an amateur. Let’s go! Lucious and Cookie torpedoed Harper Scott’s profile on him, so the writer got even by giving Andre evidence that his supposedly…