culture

There’s no getting around it: The new movie Dope is dope (I know, but I could not resist). One would expect no less from the writer and director who brought us The Wood and Brown Sugar. Filmmaker Rick Famuyiwa has definitely redeemed himself after his underwhelming last film, 2010’s Our Family Wedding. “I made a…

If someone had told me six years ago that Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield—the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—would speak out against police brutality and anti-black racism with more conviction than the nation’s first black president, I would have laughed in that person’s face. But that’s exactly what’s happened. Speaking at their annual…

One of the timeliest and most relevant documentaries to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, this week may just be 3 1/2 Minutes. That is the amount of time it took for Michael Dunn, a white man, to argue with and then shoot and kill Jordan Davis, an unarmed black teenager,…

Last week, Larry Wilmore—host of Comedy Central’s new late-night gig The Nightly Show—began his monologue with this: “Man, all of the good bad-race stuff happened already. Seriously. There’s none left. We’re done.” But anyone who’s been paying attention to the fast-changing news cycle these days knows that Wilmore’s razor-sharp comedic timing couldn’t have come at a…

Does love know no color? The ad campaign for Kevin Costner’s new film Black or White definitely supports that idea, pushing the hashtag #LoveKnowsNoColor while promoting the transracial custody drama. Black or White pits a child’s white maternal grandfather (Costner) against her black paternal grandmother (played by Octavia Spencer) in a legal battle for custody.…