culture
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Are We Afraid to Correct Other People’s Misbehaving Children?
At the beginning of the year, the viral video of the moment that everyone was talking about showed an unsupervised boy wreaking all kinds of hell inside a Tallahassee, Fla., Dollar General store. For three recorded minutes and the untold number before he was on camera, he smacked plastic trash cans and laundry baskets from…
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Horrifying but Common: Spring Break and Sexual Assault
Like many, I’ve been following the news story about a 19-year-old woman who was publicly gang-raped during spring break in Panama City, Fla. Dozens of people watched or recorded the incident, which is how it came to the attention of authorities who were investigating an unrelated crime in another state. The woman, who was semiconscious…
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The Rebirth of Billie Holiday
Some say that Billie Holiday is the greatest jazz singer ever. Her crystalline vocal clarity sounds like a bell, and the way she bent, swooped on and swerved around notes was from the heart of the blues. She could be girlish and youthful, but even as a teenager, she intoned a gravelly quality of maturity.…
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Black Women, Welcome to Your Breakdown
Author Benilde Little wants black women to know it’s OK. It’s OK to let go. It’s OK to cry. It’s OK to break down. In fact, in her new memoir, Welcome to My Breakdown, she welcomes black women doing so, becoming vulnerable and confronting their pain. In Breakdown, Little recounts her life as someone whom…
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Black America: We Can’t Afford to Wait
In the critically acclaimed book Why We Can’t Wait, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.” In the awe-inspiring treatise, ranked No. 78 on Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction works, King writes: “Just as lightning makes…
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A Save-Your-Life, Year-by-Year Medical Guide for Women
Add it to the list of slavery and Jim Crow’s legacies: the tendency to look after other people’s well-being at the expense of ourselves. But 150 years after the “peculiar institution’s” end, many black women tend to their jobs, their children and their partners—even their hair—before taking care of their own health. The tragic consequence…
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Hey Haters, if Erica Campbell’s ‘Trap’ Gospel Song Brings the Message to the Masses, What’s the Problem?
I grew up on gospel music, listening to songs of the genre that would be considered classics. My grandmother was the choir director of a church in Detroit, where I spent every summer. My mother took me to Washington, D.C.’s Vermont Avenue nearly every Sunday morning, and on the occasional seventh day I wasn’t sitting…
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NY Teen Overcomes ‘Dark-Skinned’ Taunts to Earn $10,000 Scholarship
“Burnt toast.” “Dark as night.” “Your mother kept you in the oven too long.” These were the kinds of racially charged comments that Nosa Akol walked into on her very first day of middle school, which would mark the first time in her life she’d ever been subjected to bullying. The results were damaging. Nosa…
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Fruits, Nuts and Raw Food: An Extreme Solution to an Expanding Problem
On July 3, 2014, three weeks before my 48th birthday, I weighed in at 207 pounds. I hadn’t weighed myself for a few months. The number was shocking to me for a couple of reasons: 1) I was 27 pounds heavier than my ideal healthy weight. 2) I was a vegan (no meat, no eggs,…
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Caught on Camera Isn’t Enough
Does “caught on tape” mean a conviction? While cellphone video of Walter Scott’s death at the hands of Police Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, S.C., is damning, the past has taught us that sometimes video isn’t enough. Yet without it, most cases turn into a dead man’s body versus an officer’s claim of justifiable…