culture
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What if the Video of Eric Garner’s Choke Hold Didn’t Exist?
Ramsey Orta could have been arrested for recording what police were doing to Eric Garner. That would have changed everything. According to the New York Daily News, the internal police report about the incident doesn’t even mention that Garner was put in a choke hold, a maneuver prohibited by New York Police Department policy. That…
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106-Year-Old Black DC Church to Be Sold to Developer
Soon, the Alexander Memorial Baptist Church, a historic, century-old black church in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C., will be no more, according to WJLA. The church is being sold for $6.5 million to a developer, with plans to turn it into either condominiums or townhouses, according to the news station. The reason for the…
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‘Shopping While Black’ Vine User Rashid Polo: If Profiling Keeps Happening, I’ll Have to Record It
Rashid Polo, who made waves on the Internet last week after his Vine video of convenience store employees following him drew 30 million views, has no plans to stop filming his racial profilers. “If it keeps happening, I’m going to be forced to record it,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “Hopefully it doesn’t happen again,…
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Canadians Step In to Help Detroit During Water-Shutoff Crisis
Detroit has found interesting allies in Canada as the bankrupt city’s residents face water shutoffs due to unpaid bills in a crackdown by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. According to the Detroit Free Press, a Canadian group will be trying to send a convoy of some eight cars adorned patriotically with Canadian flags through…
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Video Surfaces of 2nd Man Apparently Choked by NYPD
An internal investigation is being launched within the New York City Police Department after a second video reportedly surfaced of another officer using an alleged choke hold on a man during an arrest. Choke holds are banned by the NYPD as a tactic for restraining a suspect. According to the Associated Press, on July 14,…
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Renisha McBride Shooting Trial Begins in Detroit
As the highly controversial Renisha McBride shooting trial began in Detroit Wednesday, jurors heard two different versions of what happened that night from the lawyers on opposing sides in their opening statements, the Detroit Free Press reports. Lawyers for Theodore Wafer—the 55-year-old Dearborn Heights, Mich., resident charged in the shooting death of the young, unarmed…
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Study: Black Women Make Only 64 Cents for Every Dollar White Men Earn
It’s been 50 years to the month since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced, making employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex and national origin” illegal and paving the way for equal-employment opportunity for everyone, right? Wrong. For women of color, especially black women, inequality in pay,…
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Heroic Ebola Doctor Contracts Lethal Virus
He was hailed as a national hero in his home country of Sierra Leone for his work treating patients of the deadly Ebola virus. However, now, the New York Post reports, virologist Sheik Umar Khan has become a victim of the very disease he was trying to battle, the latest casualty in the epidemic that…
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Mother Who Lost Her 11-Year-Old to Stray Bullet at 1st Sleepover Speaks
A teary Shaneetha Goodloe sat down with ABC 7 on Monday to talk about the shooting death of her daughter. “Every morning I wake up and I cry for at least three hours. I just can’t believe it,” Goodloe told ABC on Monday. Goodloe worked hard to keep her 11-year-old daughter, Shamiya Adams, from the realities…
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Leaders Like Ken Noble Remind Us of the Value of Affirmative Action
This week the New York Times ran an obituary of one of its own—Kenneth B. Noble. Noble closed his professional career as a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. He had started that career with 17 years as a reporter for the Times, including a five-year stint…