culture
-
Get Sweaty but Be Beautiful With These Fitness-Fashion Tips
Gone are the days of throwing on your old college T-shirt and oversized sweatpants to hit the gym. Fitness clubs are the new golf course, Match.com and runway ready. So if you’re single, looking to make a new business connection or just want to join the rapidly growing fitness-fashion trend (known as athleisure) then learn…
-
Rachel Dolezal’s Imitation Game: Why Couldn’t She Struggle and Be White?
Conventional wisdom on the peculiar and seemingly otherworldly case of Spokane, Wash., NAACP President Rachel Dolezal might offer us the old maxim, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Others might hope that we wake up tomorrow and discover that Dolezal was indeed the long-lost stepchild of Black Like Me white journalist John Howard Griffin.…
-
It’s Time Again for ‘the Blackest White People We Know’
A few years ago, we did a few roundups of a bunch of white people who, well, exhibited traits, dispositions and interests more consistent with the black experience. Rachel Dolezal, the president of a local NAACP chapter in Washington state, has practically emerged as the mascot for this group. The prima donna of “the Blackest White People We Know.” Reports…
-
Keeping the Peace When My Fiance and Friend Clashed
I haven’t watched last week’s episode of the TV show I’m currently on, Blood Sweat and Heels. I had a digital copy of the episode before I boarded a plane at JFK Airport on an international flight last week. I haven’t seen the episode because I don’t want to. Let me explain: This season has…
-
Black Parents Are the Real MVPs
There’s more to being a black parent than beating our kids, grieving for them or hollering at them. This may seem like an obvious point, but I’m compelled to make it after what we’ve witnessed recently in a spate of high-profile news events. Images of black moms “whooping” their kids in public or expressing anger…
-
American Black Film Festival: Our Stories, Told Our Way
The American Black Film Festival is once again taking place in New York City, from Thursday through Sunday. The annual event, which began as the Acapulco Black Film Festival in 1997 before moving to Miami Beach in 2002 and then Los Angeles in 2007, came to the Big Apple last year and took the city…
-
A Man and His Dreads: A Twisted Love Story
Obsession with black hair is usually considered the provenance of black women, not black men. It is the women we see worrying about whether to go natural, relaxed or straightened—whether to weave, braid or dread. And yet this is where we enter Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, the second book from radio personality-turned-University of Richmond professor Bert Ashe.…
-
Orange Is the New Black: Catching Up With the Characters
Elaine G. Flores is a New York writer, editor and bon vivant. She’s a hard-core shipper and excommunicated soap opera reviewer. Her fictional dinner-party guests include Omar Little, Buffy Summers, Abigail Mills and Ichabod Crane. You can visit her site, TV Recappers Delight.
-
Here’s Some White Privilege: BuzzFeed Plagiarist Rewarded With Fawning Newspaper Profile
Benny Johnson—the slick, serially plagiarizing cat formerly known as “BuzzFeed Benny”—is now officially the poster boy for white-privilege, double-standard journalism. How that happened is the new answer to the immortal question of the late Baltimore-born entrepreneur and philanthropist Reginald F. Lewis: “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?” Because, well … they’re white guys.…
-
Dating a Mentor Who’s in a Relationship Will Only Bring Double the Trouble
I’m a 30-year-old female, and I have a male mentor who is in his mid-50s. He has been instrumental in helping me navigate through my professional life. We have great conversations. I feel there is a connection. I’m not sure if he feels the same. We talk about both personal and professional things, we’ve hung…