culture
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Misty Copeland to Dance Swan Lake at DC’s Kennedy Center
History will be made at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on the evening of Thursday, April 9, when Misty Copeland, a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre, joins Brooklyn Mack of the Washington Ballet in a performance of Swan Lake. Copeland and Mack, both African American, will go where no dancers of color have gone…
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Handing Out Seed Money so That Black Tech Startups Can Grow
In this high-tech world we live in—where tech startups are creating new apps and gadgets daily that can do everything from ordering food to hailing a cab—the fact that black entrepreneurs make up only 1 percent of the founders of tech startups that receive major financial backing is pretty abysmal. But there are several programs…
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National Action Network Hosts Its Annual Convention in NYC
Last month I was in Selma, Ala., as the nation commemorated the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when peaceful voting-rights demonstrators were viciously beaten by police. Their dedication to equality and justice resonated with people from varying backgrounds and eventually helped usher in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Five decades after that historic day…
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She Got Game: ESPN’s Jemele Hill Is the Queen of Sports Talk
When people see ESPN personality Jemele Hill sitting among a sea of male prognosticators, effortlessly spewing her valued opinions on current and compelling sports topics, not everyone may agree with her—but you have to respect her gangsta. Although she was raised humbly in crime-ridden Detroit at a time when poverty was protocol, jobs were leaving…
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Scandal Recap: Family Matters
This week’s Scandal episode introduced us to some new faces, brought back a familiar one and raised a number of questions. Olivia’s gut is back. Sort of? Olivia wakes up—flawless and without a head scarf (girl, please)—next to the sexy stranger she picked up at a bar a few episodes ago. Scandal’s DJ should have played “Brown Skin” by…
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Being Too Scared to Reveal You Have an STD Is No Excuse for Ruining Someone Else’s Life
I started talking to this guy and he was great—everything I could ask for and more. There’s just one problem: I have a sexually transmitted disease, and I was completely embarrassed and scared to tell him, especially after the way I have been treated in the past. I kept it to myself and continued to…
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Stuart Scott: The Story of How He Fought Until the End
ESPN anchor Stuart Scott is in a production trailer by himself and he is in tears. It is days before the Jimmy V Perseverance Award speech he will give during the ESPYs that will become the pièce de résistance of his brilliant career; a career full of in-depth interviews, “boo-yahs” and well-timed, creative, black-folk puns like,…
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That Afro Is a Lie
A friend of a friend of mine a while back was lamenting why her natural hair did not look like X celebrity she really liked. That celeb’s hair was so big, thick and full, the curls so dynamic and bouncy. What products could this celeb be using? Was there a twist-out technique she could use…
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Violence Against South Asians Is Linked to Bias Against African Americans
When 57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel was slammed facedown to the ground by an Alabama police officer in February, leaving him partially paralyzed, the Hindu American Foundation moved quickly to announce that it was developing a Hinduism 101 training for first responders “to improve the cultural competency of police officers and avoid the escalation of incidents based on language…
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Why a Comical Book About Slavery? Ask Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty’s writing defies categorization. The author’s two collections of poetry and three novels have alternately been called satirical, dystopian, absurdist and postmodern. While the closest classification, Beatty himself admits, is absurdist, even that is rather wide of the mark. Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, is, on a plot level, the story of Mr. Me,…