culture

Confession: I missed the Emmy Awards Sunday night. I was driving back to New York for work on Monday. It means I missed Viola Davis become the first black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. It means I missed Taraji P. Henson going HAM in the audience and…

It is said that the two things we should never discuss at family gatherings are politics and religion; otherwise, passionate, terrible disagreements will occur—perhaps even estrangements that will last months, if not years. When Alana Raybon converted from the Christianity of her upbringing to Islam, silence was the route she and her still-Christian mother, Patricia…

Cookie, Lucious and the Lyon sons are back Wednesday when Empire returns to Fox for a second season. The show, which is so big everyone is trying to claim credit for it, kept making ratings history week after week last season, including the finale, which set a record with 16.7 million total viewers. No wonder…

So, I’ve heard this term “white tears” used before. What exactly does it mean? As I’ve written before, “white tears” is a phrase to describe what happens when certain types of white people either complain about a nonexistent racial injustice or are upset by a nonwhite person’s success at the supposed expense of a white person.…

Bomani Jones is a familiar face to sports fans. At ESPN he pulls double duty, and double mediums, as one-third of the hip-hop-friendly Highly Questionable and then holds down the fort on his own radio show, The Right Time With Bomani Jones. Sports guru is not the typical career path for the son of two…

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Since picking up a crochet hook in the 1980s, Harlem-based fiber artist and cultural activist Xenobia Bailey has created sculptural marvels in the unexpected medium of yarn, moving from works of wearable art to large-scale installations celebrating the uniquely African-American aesthetic of funk. Now her first public-art commission, Funktional Vibrations, is on permanent view at…