culture

It was another tear-gas-filled night in Ferguson, Mo., as protesters continued to demand justice in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a still-unnamed police officer. A militarized police force with riot gear and SWAT vehicles continued to demand that protesters disperse around 9 p.m., according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But demonstrators were…

An African-American math teacher who had been given three warnings for foul language and eventually was dismissed after she was found to have called students “lazy n—gers” may be given her job back after a technicality in her firing, WJXT reports.   According to the news station, Florida teacher Joyce Quiller ran a “profanity-laced classroom”…

Black children face a 50 percent likelihood of developing diabetes during their lifetime. This staggering figure is according to a study published Wednesday in The Lancet, Mother Jones reports. Compare that with only a 40 percent chance for American children overall. The epidemiologists who conducted the study based their findings on mortality data for nearly…

America may have a black president, black billionaires and Beyoncé gracing every magazine cover in 2014, but in the world of high fashion, runways are whiter than ever. Iconic supermodel Beverly Johnson, in an interview with The Root, says that the industry she broke barriers in is actually worse and less receptive today than during…

During their childhood spent in Harlem, retired NBC Universal executive Paula Madison and her two brothers knew they were different. On strolls through their predominantly black neighborhood with their mother, Nell Vera Lowe—who was half Jamaican and half Chinese—their obvious Asian heritage made them magnets for stares and questions about their ethnicity. Madison remembers her…

Editor’s note: In a Grapevine blog earlier today, we recounted the experience of a passenger on board Spirit Airlines, who claimed to have seen an African-American passenger denied a seat and sent to the back of the plane when a white man refused to move. Spirit Airlines contacted us about the incident and was insistent…

On Saturday a police officer shot a teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. On Sunday the world knew the teen’s name, and by Monday Ferguson was on fire. The images were jarring, and rightfully so—the appropriate backdrop to an oppressive police environment that isn’t new in a sleepy railroad town, 70 percent of whose residents are…

Michael Brown had a strange dream in the weeks before his death. According to the Associated Press, the unarmed teen’s uncle, Charles Ewing, said that Brown had declared Jesus as his savior weeks before the incident. Brown later had a dream, telling relatives that he saw a body covered by a sheet and he thought…

Ma’lik Richmond, one of the Steubenville, Ohio, teens convicted for raping a 16-year-old girl in a case that rocked the nation, is back to playing football with his high school team after his release, the New York Daily News reports. The 18-year-old, one of two offenders involved in the horrific crime against the young girl…