culture
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Watch: Passengers Confront Racist on Train
A woman captured on video racially insulting another woman was confronted by other passengers on a Central Coast & Newcastle train in Australia, according to video uploaded by YouTube user Kareem Abdul. The confrontation began when the older woman apparently turned aggressive “toward a group of kids 12 and under who wouldn’t give up their seats,”…
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15 Shot in Chicago as July 4th Weekend Starts
At least 15 people, including two teens, were shot in Chicago as the Fourth of July holiday weekend began, according to NBC Chicago. The first fatality among the shootings took place shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side in what police suspect was a drug deal…
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Who Will Save Our Missing Children of Color?
A few weeks ago while attending the American Black Film Festival in New York City, I witnessed the short film Muted. Written by Brandi Ford, featuring Grey’s Anatomy star Chandra Wilson and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and directed by Rachel Goldberg, Muted was only 20 minutes long, but the offering sat on my chest like a lump of steel for days afterward. In the…
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Battle for Black Voters’ Rights Rages on in North Carolina
Midterm elections are right around the corner, and for the North Carolina NAACP and the Advancement Project, this month represents a do-or-die moment in what will be the last time to put an end to the sweeping voter-suppression law enacted in June 2013 before voting starts this year. At an injunction hearing scheduled for Monday,…
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Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Leads to More Than $5,400,000 in Donations
The pot of gold at the end of Reading Rainbow is somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.4 million. At the end of May, executive producer and host LeVar Burton launched the Kickstarter campaign in hopes of creating a Web version of the popular PBS show. He saw its initial goal of $1 million reached just…
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‘What Would Jesus Do?’ Well … Tyler Perry Owns That
Tyler Perry just won the rights to use the popular phrase “What Would Jesus Do,” the Hollywood Reporter reports. The actor, director and screenwriter insisted that he wasn’t looking for exclusive ownership of or rights to the word “Jesus” beyond that ’90s quip, the entertainment site notes. The phrase was caught up in a trademark…
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Tracing Dad’s Ancestry Without His DNA
Editor’s note: This column was originally published May 3, 2013. A common problem that people encounter when trying to trace their roots on a particular parent’s side using DNA testing is that the parent is dead or not available to them. The reader below has encountered this roadblock, but there are ways around it. I…
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Hobby Lobby Ruling Opens the Door to ‘Method Discrimination’ for Black Women
Apologists for the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling this week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores are fond of pointing out that the arts and crafts retail chain includes 16 forms of contraception under its health insurance plan and excludes only four. And by framing this as corporate benevolence, Hobby Lobby and the court have effectively opened…
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Opie & Anthony Host Calls Black Woman a ‘Savage’ During Racist Twitter Rant
Editor’s note: This article contains tweets that some may find offensive. Anthony Cumia, the “Anthony” half of the enormously unfunny shock-jock comedy team of Opie and Anthony—whose show by the same name airs on SiriusXM—was out late in New York taking photos, some of which included women dressed in club attire who did not give…
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Watch: Larenz Tate Says Hollywood Limits Black Experience to 1 Lane
Black thug. Welfare queen. Token black friend. Crazy black woman. Vigilante slave. We’re well-aware that these stereotypes have flooded big and small screens with shortsighted portrayals of the collective black experience. Actor Larenz Tate sat down with HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill on Tuesday and discussed how stereotypical black roles are still overrepresented in…