culture

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…

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…

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…

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…