culture

Single-sex schools can be advantageous for black boys, Freeden Oeur argues in a piece at CNN, and shouldn’t be considered more examples of segregation. After conducting research at an all-boys, nearly all-black school in the Northeast, Oeur found that single-sex schools can tailor their culture and programs for at-risk African-American males. Separation is not always a form…

When black films come out, Stacia L. Brown explains at The Prospect, the response of black audiences can be categorized in seven ways: “doubt, guilt, self-preservation, annoyance, anger, vulnerability and acceptance.” Brown discusses these reactions in the context of recent releases including 12 Years a Slave, Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Django Unchained.…

Jamilah Lemieux at Ebony magazine has a hunch that some black men’s resentments about interracial dating lie at the crux of their opinions of Scandal and the black women who adore the show. That’s the real reason they didn’t lose any sleep over Kerry Washington’s Emmy loss.  Let’s go back to last month, when Kerry…

What do you call a person who, instead of leaving a tip at a restaurant, writes “none” on the receipt and instead jots down the n-word near the line asking for “Total”? A racist cheapskate would be fitting. But don’t call Devin Barnes one — he denies being the man who wrote the hurtful word…

The day Mary Hunter, 73, of Gary, Ind., came up with the idea for a way to marinate the inside of the big roasts she would make for her fellow congregation members at Yes Lord Church, she knew she had invented a revolutionary cooking tool. But according to a profile on Hunter in the New…

The difficulty of an adapting a book into a film is staying true to the original text. And, of course, those who have read a work prior to seeing the film will go into the movie making mental notes about what the film got right, what it got wrong and what it decided to keep…

(The Root) — Two generations of Americans might recall, as vividly as yesterday, the waking radio chatter and day-breaking TV news reports of March 9, 1997, the morning the Notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed in Los Angeles.  Surely Brooklyn, N.Y., remembers.  Sixteen years after his death, Christopher Wallace occupies a larger-than-life prominence in the…

(The Root) — Eight years old was far too young for me to lose my virginity. And I certainly didn’t have the opportunity to lose it at that age. But if I could have, I would have. It was all I could think about, and it was all any of my teammates on my little…

At the Nation, Mychal Denzel Smith says that a viral video of white Philadelphia police officers harassing black pedestrians highlights the inherent problems in stop and frisk and underscores a larger problem in America — racism. This video was recorded on September 27 and uploaded to YouTube a few days later. It has recently made…

The Daily Beast‘s Jamelle Bouie examines the Tea Party’s plans for its next battle against President Obama in the aftermath of its devastating shutdown defeat. Members are now charging that Americans never approved the Affordable Care Act, he says. This was supposed to be Jim DeMint’s moment. As head of the Heritage Foundation, chief sponsor…