culture

One of the more shocking things revealed in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s scandal, in which the Chicago politician was found guilty of illegally spending campaign funds on superfluous items, was his taste in clothing. Jackson had a penchant for mink capes, as if he were trying to bring back the 1970s. As Halloween fast approaches, those…

When The Arsenio Hall Show made its comeback to late-night television last week, almost 20 years had passed since it was on the air. But one look at the show’s first-week numbers, as provided by Shadow and Act via a press release, and it looks as though Hall was missed by a lot of people. “The…

(The Root) — This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.  A young black woman stands in a delicately swaying posture, holding a large lidded…

(The Root) — Last month, Southern rapper and Academy Award winner Juicy J announced via Twitter that he was offering a $50,000 scholarship to “the best chick who can twerk.” It was a marketing strategy to gain interest in “Scholarship” — a song off his latest album, Stay Trippy — and no doubt an opportunity…

(The Root) — On Thursday, Sept. 12, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University convened a National Dialogue on Race Day. The standing-room-only event attracted upwards of 400 people to discuss racial justice and equality in America 50 years after the March on Washington. The struggle for racial justice necessitates…

Michaela Angela Davis, in a piece at CNN, lays out the very distinct receptions that two African-American hairstyles — the Afro of Dante de Blasio, the son of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio; and the dreadlocks of Tiana Parker, a little girl in Tulsa, Okla. — received in recent weeks, from the…

Nadiah Rodriguez writes at Clutch magazine that Mister Cee’s wife must be coping with a boatload of “self-doubt, paranoia and humiliation” and that her ordeal should be discussed and addressed as vehemently as her husband’s. Her pain, and even her existence, is markedly absent from the conversation about Mister Cee. The situation reminds me of…

In a piece for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates examines the decline in the marriage rate among black families and is not bothered it. He says that women today are determining if marriage advances “their interests as much as it once did,” and people should consider what women in the past had to endure in order…

As predicted by some film connoisseurs, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave received the People’s Choice Award as audience favorite at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend, Deadline reports. The film, about a black violinist living in 1841 New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, is already being talked about…

In a revealing Q&A with New York magazine’s Vulture.com, Oprah Winfrey discusses how she took her television network, OWN, from life support to profitable. There were numerous factors, chief among them bringing in trusted charges Sheri Salata and Erik Logan to help right the ship, and giving her partners at Discovery Communications more of a…