culture

Fulvio Bressan, a sixth-generation Italian winemaker, faces a boycott of his business after posting a racist rant on Facebook on Aug. 22 about Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s first black government minister, according to the Huffington Post. Though Kyenge, an outspoken advocate of looser immigration laws, has been a frequent target of racist public incidents in recent months, Bressan’s note was particularly abusive.…

Fox 8 is reporting that New Orleans law enforcement authorities have released a video that captured the shooting of an unarmed black man by police as they entered his home last year during a botched drug raid. Former New Orleans police officer Joshua Colclough was sentenced to four years in prison last month in the…

A Jacksonville, Fla., parent has started a petition on change.org asking that a school district to change the name of a high school named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first  “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, the Washington Post reports. The petition has accumulated about 75,000 signatures so far. And, according to…

(The Root) — Fifty years ago tomorrow, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed. Four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair — died in the blast. Violence broke out on the streets in Birmingham, a city with a long history of resistance to Jim Crow…

(The Root) — The identities of the four little girls who died in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Sept. 15, 1963, have been lumped together to serve to reference a point in the struggle for civil rights. The girls came to represent the violence black people endured at the hands of the Ku Klux…

Following the spate of bad press that George Zimmerman has received since he was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin, Don Lemon, in a piece at BlackAmericaWeb, suggests that he borrow a page from Casey Anthony and disappear from the spotlight.  … George, you had the audacity to take a big, cheesy smiley picture…

Stanley Crouch, writing at the Daily News, says it’s a mistake for the Obama administration to think that a strike on Syria would be quick and easy, citing the length of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as examples. In Pablo Picasso’s paintings, war comes down to two things: slaughtering the innocent and raping available women. In a…

In a piece at MyBrownBaby, Stacey Conner, a white mother, explores the complex social challenges surrounding the grooming of her black daughter’s hair, including dealing with comments from classmates, strangers and black and white mothers. It’s a strange no-man’s land I find myself in; I fear the judgment of black moms that I meet and…

The New York Times is reporting that even as thousands of ballots from New York City’s mayoral primary had yet to be counted on Thursday, Democrats and Republicans began to square off, highlighting the deep ideological divide of a general-election matchup. Campaigning for the first time since securing the Republican nomination, [Joseph L.] Lhota promised…

Thus far, 2013 has been a renaissance of sorts for the music career of Pharrell Williams. His collaborations with others — and even his own songs, in which he is front and center — have been all over the radio and all up in the clubs, but no song has been more omnipresent than “Blurred…