culture

  • Watch: SC Highway Patrol Trooper Shoots Man Going for His License

    Editor’s note: This story includes video footage that some may find disturbing. Video has been released of a South Carolina Highway Patrol trooper approaching a man regarding a traffic violation and then shooting him, seemingly for no reason, The State reports. Officer Sean Groubert has been arrested and charged with assault and battery of a…

  • Homeless Great-Grandmother Beaten by Calif. Cop Reaches Settlement

    The July 1 video of a police officer sitting atop a black woman and raining down punches on her went viral. The story would soon emerge that the woman, Marlene Pinnock, a 51-year-old great-grandmother, was homeless and headed to an underpass to sleep when a California Highway Patrol officer stopped her, threw her to the…

  • Alaska Reporter Who Quit on Air Allegedly Harassed Neighbors With Her Marijuana Habits

    Charlo Greene, the Alaska reporter who stunned viewers when she abruptly quit her job on air to devote her time to marijuana advocacy, is probably not going to win any employee-of-the-month awards, and she apparently isn’t neighbor of the year, either. According to the New York Daily News, an Alaska father filed a restraining order against…

  • Here’s Some History Behind That ‘Angry Black Woman’ Riff the NY Times Tossed Around

    If you’re a devoted Scandal watcher, by now you’ve read, or at least heard, about the New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley and her painfully off-key review of Shonda Rhimes’ television oeuvre, which, mercifully, has been roundly blasted by The Root’s Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele, Vulture’s Margaret Lyons and many, many others. Even as Stanley and the Times…

  • Scandal Returns: 10 Things to Remember Before the Season Premiere

    Scandal-heads, we’ve gone through five months of withdrawal, and with Thursday night’s season 4 premiere, we’re finally going to get our fix! We’ve got our wine and popcorn ready, but first, let’s take a quick look back at where our favorite characters landed at the end of season 3. 1. Olivia and Jake fly off…

  • Prime-Time TV Inches Closer to Living Color

    The title alone was enough to set some people on edge.   But the producers of ABC’s Black-ish have spent a lot of time assuring potential viewers that the show isn’t just a collection of jokes about an upper-middle-class family.   Instead, the sitcom about a black, upper-middle-class dad (Anthony Anderson) who fears that his kids…

  • Surveillance Video Released of Wal-Mart Toy-Gun Police Shooting

    Surveillance video of John Crawford III’s last moments inside a Beavercreek, Ohio, Wal-Mart has been released. Crawford can be seen walking into the store, picking up the air rifle and then walking the aisle holding the gun. He never holds the air rifle in a shooting stance, but he can be seen with the gun…

  • 100 Years Later, a New Black Film Emerges

    Recently discovered reels from a 1913 film have become the oldest-known footage of a movie featuring a black cast, reports the New York Times. Found in the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the untitled silent film depicts middle-class black life in the early-Jim Crow era. The footage found…

  • ABC’s New Black-ish Strives to Keep It Real While Keeping It Funny

    If 2013 was all about “cultural appropriation”—the Grammys, Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” Billboard’s color vacancy, that damn twerk—then 2014 might just be all about “policing” bodies, respectability … and blackness. Everywhere you look, there are guidelines being open-source administered by all but unfortunately adhered to only by few. So maybe it makes sense that this would be…

  • Watch: Pregnant Woman Thrown to the Ground Belly-First by NYPD Officer

    Sandra Amezquita was trying to come to the aid of her son, 17-year-old Jhohan Lemos, who was being arrested by police. However, one New York City Police Department officer didn’t take too kindly to her intervention and tossed the 44-year-old, who is five months pregnant, to the ground, stomach-first, before straddling her back, with her…