culture
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Watch: Gabrielle Union Gets Candid About Her Own Rape
As he raped me, I began to hover over myself. I could see the whole room. I looked at that poor crying girl as she was being raped and thought, “Things like this happen to bad people. Things like this don’t happen to people like me.” My psyche, my body, my soul, simply could not…
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I Tried It: Notes From a Silent Party
Confession: I was absolutely thinking about pulling out of my first silent party an hour before I was to leave for it. I was running on minimal sleep and nursing a dehydration headache all day; and it was one of those cold, rainy fall days for which God invented cuffing season, malbec and Showtime Anytime.…
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A Crime by Any Other Name Is Probably Not Mental Illness
Stop me if you have heard this before: A person with a gun walks into a church and shoots as many people as he can before being killed. What is to blame for this? Regarding the recent Texas church massacre, President Donald Trump stated that this was caused by a “mental health problem.” In other…
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If the Texas Church Shooter Wasn’t White
At least 26 people were killed and another 20 wounded in a brutal terror attack when a white, Christian American from gun-loving rural Texas opened fire in a Lone Star State house of worship Sunday. The shooter, Devin Patrick Kelley, had a long history of violence and white-on-white crime before committing this act of terrorism. Tenderhearted…
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Don’t Let the Smile Fool You. I’m Cringing on the Inside
In all truth, I was originally never going to tell this story. Because for the longest time, I didn’t even know if there was a story. I didn’t take what had happened to me seriously. Sexual harassment, unwanted sexual attention, grabby or flirtatious old men; we’re taught as women to make excuses for them, especially…
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What #JusticeForJazzy Would Look Like if I Were Jazzy
My formative years were spent on the south side of New York City’s Jamaica, Queens. The small neighborhood is almost considered a quiet suburb of New York City. Quiet—it is not. Suburban—kinda, sorta, but not quite. Sure, there were blocks of tree-lined streets, houses and backyards with grassy knolls, but it also included the 40s…
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Yoga Greenbook: How 1 Woman Is Working to Make the Transformational Power of Yoga Accessible to the Black Community
Yoga is still sometimes not seen as something for the black community. With Instagram, representation has gotten a lot better (I follow a series of amazing black yogis myself), but still, in ads, clothing-store posters, photo shoots and what have you, the yoga community, like everything else in the United States, is mostly represented by…
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These Portraits of Dads in Madagascar Offer an Intimate Glimpse of Black Fatherhood in Other Parts of the World
With an endless array of pristine landscapes and animals that are native to no other region in the world, the country of Madagascar—located in the Indian Ocean—draws in hundreds of thousands of tourists every year from nearly every country in the world. But beyond the images of lemurs and baobab trees that were made famous…
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You Got a Little Soul in You, I See
I am often asked about my name. “Nabil. It’s an Arabic name,” I’ll say. “It means noble, learned and generous,” which usually demands further interest. “Where are you from?” They’ve likely narrowed down their guess to somewhere in the Middle East, hoping for a story as interesting as the name itself. “New York. My mother…