culture
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Atlanta Is Back With More of That Weird Stuff
It’s been a minute—a president ago—since Atlanta’s first season entranced us. The show quickly became a career launching pad for its core cast: Far-out buddy Lakeith Stanfield traveled to the sunken place; sometimes-girlfriend Zazie Beetz is in surefire blockbuster Deadpool 2; upstart rapper Brian Tyree Henry got some guest spots on How to Get Away…
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Facts of Life to Living Single: Kim Fields Celebrates 40-Year Career in New Memoir
Growing up on the television screen, notable moments of actress and director Kim Fields’ career are linked to several classic sitcoms, from Good Times to Diff’rent Strokes. Since stepping into the public eye in a 1976 Mrs. Butterworth’s commercial, and her sitcom debut on the short-lived Baby, I’m Back in 1978, Fields has built a…
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Pain and Policy: Why Reparative Justice Is Needed to End the War on Drugs [Retracted]
RETRACTED (6/12/18): This story has been removed because we have discovered it was in breach of our editorial standards. If you’d like to know more, you can read an editor’s note here. A cached version of the story is available here for transparency.
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If White Privilege Were a Sentient Being, It Would Make Sweet Love to This Article in The Atlantic on Gun Culture
I am a proud black man. I am an unapologetic black man. I am a liar. To be black in America is to be an apology. To be a black man is to learn how to make yourself small at an early age. It is to constantly crumple yourself up into something … anything smaller…
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I Think Donald Trump and the NRA Just Solved All That Black Lives Matter Stuff
In the ongoing search for solutions to police brutality and state violence, black America has proposed some pretty outlandish ideas, including police accountability, better law enforcement training and—most radical of all—not hiring racist cops. But the recent debate about school safety and gun control has enlightened me to the fact that the previously mentioned ideas…
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Malcolm X Tells His Story in New Documentary Featuring Rarely and Never-Before-Seen Footage
In front of a rapt audience at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Malcolm X’s third daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, talked about witnessing the assassination of her father at Harlem’s Audubon Theatre and Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. “I’m told my mother placed her entire body over my sisters and me that…
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On the Duality and Double Consciousness of Black Panther
Through my multiple viewings of Black Panther (four so far), I become aware of certain traits of the characters, their ideals and how the actors’ portrayals of them shed light on the struggles that black people and the world at large experience with tradition vs. technology, and other dichotomies. They stand out to me because…
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My Name Is Myeisha Is a Dramatic Hip-Hop Musical That Tells the Heartbreaking Story of Tyisha Miller’s 1998 Murder
On Dec. 28, 1998, police officers in Riverside, Calif., opened fire on Tyisha Miller as she lay unconscious in her Nissan Sentra. The 19-year-old was driving with her 15-year-old friend when the car’s tire went flat and the duo pulled off the side of the road. After a stranger drove Miller’s friend to get assistance…
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What I Learned From My Week as a Conservative
Two years ago, as part of an assignment, I was white. I didn’t change my skin color or anything, but I drove across country for three days into Mexico in a van with eight white men. After three days, we camped out in a remote, untouched wilderness for 12 days, hiking 75 miles total, with…
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Why It Hurts When the World Loves Everyone but Us
I’ve been processing seemingly contradictory emotions since the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. I am at once in awe of and humbled by this youth resistance movement and its solidarity efforts, and yet almost indescribably devastated. This feeling of devastation goes beyond the tragic and preventable loss of life; it is connected to the loss of…