culture

(The Root) — “My name is Linda Brown, and I have definitely hit a dead end regarding my great-grandfather, Firmin Francois Fortier. How do I find out if he was really born in Martinique? The story in the family is that he was born in Martinique on Oct. 27, 1850, to a French father and…

The Labor Department released its August jobs report today, showing that the nation’s employers added 169,000 jobs last month, just slightly below what economists had predicted. The overall unemployment rate fell to 7.3 percent from 7.4 percent, but mostly because people dropped out of the labor pool and were no longer being counted as unemployed,…

Saying they are still gathering information, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus apparently are not ready to rubber-stamp President Barack Obama’s plan to strike Syria, according to The Hill. Black Democrats were among the most consistently vocal opponents of the Iraq war a decade ago, and they’re now among the most reluctant to endorse…

Shellie Zimmerman, the wife of George Zimmerman, has filed for divorce, according to ABC News.  The petition says the couple, married in 2007, “separated on Aug. 13, 2013 and are not presently cohabiting as husband and wife. The marriage between the parties is irretrievably broken.” They have no children. Shellie Zimmerman, 26, has asked for…

New York City can’t get enough of Dante de Blasio, and it’s not just the striking Afro that sits atop his head like a crown. The 16-year-old son of New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio continues to impress with his poise and maturity. Though that hair does make for quite the cutting figure…

It looks as if Tyler Perry is going to get another opportunity to show his range as an actor. Director David Fincher has cast Perry in his next film, Gone Girl, which, according to Deadline, starts filming this fall. Perry will star opposite Ben Affleck and Neil Patrick Harris. Fincher has set Tyler Perry to play Tanner…

(The Root) — Earlier this week the Washington Post published a list of “The 10 D.C. Guys We’ve All Dated.” It included “the chill Republican dude” who wears shirts with whales on them, “the organic kale guy” who makes homemade quiche and “the Clarendon guy” who downs shots of Fireball and never misses brunch. While…

A Colorado Republican state representative reignited controversy on Wednesday when she brought a box of fried chicken to a poverty hearing, Fox31 Denver reports. The incident comes about two weeks after state Sen. Vicki Marble, a fellow Republican and poverty task force member, riled lawmakers when she identified chicken as one of the reasons for…

At the New York Times, professor of philosophy George Yancy writes an incisive piece about white people’s fear of blacks, which he says is global and has origins in Europe. For centuries, black people have been reduced to constricting and false stereotypes that force them to move through social spaces in a way designed to put…

While we want sports to be fair, sometimes what we observe “is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages,” Malcolm Gladwell writes at the New Yorker in a penetrating examination of David Epstein’s book The Sport Gene. [David] Epstein tells the…