culture
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Feeding the Homeless Was Better Than Faking Marital Bliss
A family’s decision to invite the homeless to attend their daughter’s canceled wedding reception is a reminder that something can always be salvaged to bless someone else, Nikki Woods writes at BlackAmericaWeb. A beautiful story of a couple who donated their daughter’s wedding reception dinner to 200 homeless people at Atlanta’s “Hosea Feed the Hungry,”…
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Putting a Price Tag on MJ's Death
(The Root) — Michael Jackson’s wrongful-death trial is finally coming to an end after nearly five months in court and testimony from more than 50 witnesses for the suit filed by the pop star’s family against concert promoter AEG Live. Closing statements by AEG’s attorney are under way today, with the possibility of the jury…
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Play Captures Tumult of Civil Rights Era
(The Root) — The national celebrations and commemorations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington have, once again, marked race as a subject of exploration in popular culture. The recent critical and commercial success of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which offered an epic cinematic depiction of the civil rights movement’s heroic period, has…
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Samuel L. Jackson on Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino
If Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino ever decided to have a face-to-face conversation about their thoughts on each other’s work and respective careers, the best person to moderate the discussion would have to be Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson has appeared in more than 100 films, but arguably his most memorable roles have been in movies…
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Black 2013 MacArthur Fellows
(The Root) — A photographer-video artist, a dancer-choreographer and a playwright are the three black people among this year’s group of 24 MacArthur Fellowship recipients. Carrie Mae Weems, 60, from Syracuse, N.Y., was awarded for her work in the field of photography and videography. Of Weems, the MacArthur Foundation writes: Her intimate depictions of children, adults,…
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The Racial Resentment Behind GOP's Cuts in Food Stamps
The House Republicans’ recent vote to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program is a demonstration of their animosity toward Americans of color, Brittney Cooper argues in a piece for Salon. Cooper describes how the Republican Party, beginning in the Kennedy era, intentionally manufactured the myth of a lazy African-American subgroup that does not…
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Talking Her Out of Skin Bleaching Won't Work
(The Root) — “I have a cousin who’s lived here in the United States for a few years, although, like me, she is Nigerian. (My family moved here when I was younger.) She is becoming well adjusted to American life in my opinion, with the exception of one practice from home that she still clings…
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Twitter Is Turning Us Into Political Punks
(The Root) — As seminal events take their twists and turns through the zeitgeist, more often than not we’re as likely to tweet about it as we are to act on it. These days, critical issues aren’t marked by mass movements to counteract fire hoses and snapping German shepherds on a bigot’s leash. And you’d…
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Transgender Women and Male Desire
The recent headlines about DJ Mister Cee illustrate why we need more descriptive and inclusive language to talk about male sexuality and masculinity, Mychal Denzel Smith writes at Feministing. My hope is that, along with becoming more accepting, this pushes, not just hip-hop but the wider culture as well, to develop a more useful and…
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What About Those Nontraditional 'White' Names?
Writing at Clutch magazine, Yesha Callahan describes the double standard regarding so-called black names and wonders why some of the nontraditional names that white parents give their children are not similarly critiqued. There’s always that question of “What’s in a name?” but nowadays it’s “Why do parents give black children such weird names?”. That exact question…