culture

For the past year, former Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan has been busy on her upcoming book, tentatively titled One Night at Versailles. But the Pultizer Prize winner is returning to her roots, covering the spring-summer 2014 runways at New York Fashion Week for New York magazine’s The Cut blog.  In a condensed Q&A,…

Writing at USA Today, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous uses the 350th anniversary of the Gloucester County Conspiracy — a revolt organized by black slaves and European indentured servants in Virginia — to describe the “original state of race relations” before race was introduced as a tactic to separate the disenfranchised. He also connects those…

Florida continues to find a way to mess up this whole race-relations thing. This week it’s Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, who is calling out Florida Gulf Coast University President Wilson Bradshaw. Lee’s issue? Students at FGCU who have booked Kendrick Lamar and Ludacris to perform at their annual student concert, known as Eaglepalooza. In…

Miami Heat star LeBron James, in conjunction with Tom Werner, a producer for The Cosby Show and Roseanne, will executive-produce a series for the Starz cable network, according to Black Enterprise. The sitcom, tentatively titled Survivor’s Remorse, will chronicle what two friends experience when one of them becomes extremely successful, as happened to James. The series will reportedly be set…

When black people use the n-word, we like to say it’s different, right? Unlike whites, who use the n-word toward blacks in a hateful way, blacks use the n-word as a term of endearment, never with malice. Of course, some disagree, claiming that it’s a double standard that blacks can use the n-word but whites…

With only one week to go before New York City’s primary day, candidates for mayor made their annual pilgrimage to one of the city’s oldest traditions, the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. According to the Associated Press, the major candidates took part in the parade’s festivities, each with his or her own way of…

It’s been more than a week since Miley Cyrus’ MTV Video Music Awards performance set off a wave of controversy. Her onstage antics in a furry swimsuit with Robin Thicke sparked a nationwide discourse over twerking and cultural appropriation. All the while, Cyrus has stayed quiet — until now, in an exclusive on-camera interview with…

(The Root) — Tanya Fields is a single mother of four. So in 2006, when she found an affordable apartment in New York City’s South Bronx, she moved there, only to discover the real bargain she had made. In the South Bronx, a full-service grocery store is hard to find, and obesity is common. Today…

(The Root) — America is experiencing a 21st-century civil rights movement, and with it comes new leaders. “There’s a reason why so many who marched that day and in the days to come were young,” President Obama said Wednesday on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. “For the young are unconstrained by habits…

(The Root) — At some point during the second season of Scandal, which returns to ABC for a third season on Oct. 3, I began to notice an odd “trend.” On Thursday nights, women would inevitably catch “Kerry fever” and take to the couch (and Twitter) to cure this 60-minute ailment. Watching Olivia Pope (as…