culture
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War-Torn Congolese City Sings and Dances for Lasting Peace
For a few peaceful days in February, the city of Goma, in Democratic Republic of the Congo, was filled with the sounds of music rather than the cries of war. Despite ongoing problems between their respective countries, thousands of people from neighboring Rwanda and Burundi descended on the DRC for the region’s first multinational music…
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Texas Prepared to Execute Aspiring Rapper in Murder Case
Texas is prepared to execute 33-year-old Ray Jasper on Wednesday at 6 p.m. CDT for killing a music-studio owner in 1998, Reuters reports. Jasper was convicted of slitting David Alejandro’s throat before stabbing him to death in San Antonio so that he could rob the owner of his studio equipment. Alejandro offered his space to…
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Fathers Need to Learn That Beating Daughters Won’t Make Them Good Girls
Just in time for April, which is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, there’s a new clip making the viral rounds of an angry black dad wailing on his child with a belt. In a video partially titled “Father Whoops on His 13-Year-Old Daughter Dressed Like Beyoncé After Missing for 3 Days” a scantily clad black girl…
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Cop Shown Apparently Breaking High School Student’s Arm in Cellphone Video
Cellphone video footage allegedly shows a cop breaking a student’s arm after an early March altercation at a Texas high school, the Blaze reports. The video, which captures the chaos, shows students shouting as two officers take one of the students to the ground, one of them bringing the young man’s arm behind his back.…
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Jesse Jackson Takes on Lack of Diversity in Technology
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is taking a page out of the civil rights playbook as he plans to lead a delegation to the Hewlett-Packard annual shareholders meeting Wednesday. The groups intends to bring attention to Silicon Valley’s and the nation’s poor record of including blacks and Latinos in hiring, board appointments and startup funding, the…
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Behind the Scenes With Tracey Edmonds
Tracey Edmonds never wanted to be on TV. She never dreamed of having cameras beside her face, reflecting wide and tight angles, flashing perfect teeth across the screen. A whiz-kid brainiac since birth, she attended Stanford University at 16 majoring in psycho-biology. Upon graduating at 20, Edmonds opened her own real estate and mortgage firm. But her…
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It Takes a Village to Keep Black Men Healthy
I had my annual physical examination a few days ago, and upon checking my vitals—my blood pressure score, as I’m telling everybody, was 118/72—my doctor, a 60-something white woman, jokingly remarked, “Love it when my peeps are doing well.” And though in many other settings her attempt at colloquial bonding might have been met with…
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How Can You Possibly Say There’s No Scientific Basis for Race?
In a series of Ask Me Anything sessions related to the subject matter of the Race Manners advice column, I’ve offered quick answers to questions from dozens of Reddit users. Recently, I checked my inbox there and discovered more—a lot more. I’m guessing they’re the ones that people didn’t want to ask publicly, either because…
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‘He’s So Articulate.’ What That Really Means
While I applaud Lean In’s recent launch of their Ban Bossy campaign—some like it, some don’t—I encourage them to do more. It’s not, of course, that there’s a problem with the word “bossy”; it’s that societally, we hold different expectations about bossiness for girls and women. And just as we need to work to change how…
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No, Lando Calrissian, Please No
Lando Calrissian didn’t need to be there. Neither did R2-D2 or the Ewoks, for that matter. Billy Dee Williams could have made his debut on Dancing With the Stars and done that “dance” holding an open Colt 45 and not spilled a drop with that two-step shuffle thrust, and it would have been fine. But…