culture

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…

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…

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.…

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.

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.…

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…

In our pressing public discussion about what troubles the souls of black folk, there are times when the conversation can seem phlegmatically black-man-centric. Instead of saying “unarmed black people shot by police,” we accept “unarmed black men” as the default. Yet we know that black women are being gunned down or brutalized at alarming rates,…

Harriette Cole is the author of the book of meditations 108 Stitches: Words We Live By and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter. 

As of this writing, almost 500 people—138 of them African American—have been shot and killed by police in the United States this year. These numbers come from The Guardian’s investigation that is literally counting the dead. Outrage against the epidemic of police killings of unarmed black men helped spark a national #BlackLivesMatter protest movement that…