culture

For someone who often longs to fit in and be left alone, I sure have a strange way of showing it. It all started in the overgrown fields of Inkster, Mich., in the 1970s. Summers of organized butterfly hunts with friends led to a lifelong passion for critters and a love of the great outdoors.  …

One of the brightest 20-something lights on jazz trumpet, Theo Croker—grandson of New Orleans trumpet legend Doc Cheatham—followed a more traditional jazz script on his first two records, The Fundamentals (2007) and In the Tradition (2008). For his latest, Afro Physicist, a Dee Dee Bridgewater production licensed to Sony’s Okeh label, the Florida-born-and-raised Croker flipped…

The Miami Police Department has reinstated a detective who was fired last year after shooting an unarmed black man nearly three years ago, the Miami Herald reports. The department’s firing of Reynaldo Goyos was overturned Friday after an arbitrator reviewed the case, the Herald writes, and “ordered the department to return him to his job…

Updated Sunday, Aug. 10, 12:45 p.m. EDT: The unarmed teen killed Saturday by a police officer in suburban St. Louis, Mo., allegedly engaged in an initial struggle for an officer’s gun inside a patrol car, officials said Sunday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The shooting of Michael Brown, who was set to start college Monday,…

The life of a “nerd” typically involves a certain amount of loneliness and other social challenges. Try being a black girl on top of that. Sure, mainstream culture has its ways of portraying nerd-dom as trendy and cool (hello, The Big Bang Theory), but this treatment is generally reserved for men … most often white…

This summer I’m teaching high school students in Upward Bound, a federally funded college-access program for low-income kids who are often of color. By the time they get to me, most of them have developed some level of mistrust for the educational establishment. It’s not that they aren’t concerned about school—far from it. It’s just…

We all know that Kanye West has an ax to grind with corporations—specifically with some of the major fashion houses and how he thinks they’re trying to sabotage his attempts at launching a high-end clothing line. He thinks he’s experiencing racism and celebrity-ism, saying that because he’s a musician—and a hip-hop musician at that—clothing designers…

Saying her son had been having problems listening and had been talking back and stealing, a 40-year-old South Carolina woman decided it was time to call the police when she discovered he’d watched pornography on her living room television, the Smoking Gun reports. The mother, Chavonda Gallman, told the crime-news site that she knows that…