culture

(The Root) — “Have you ever had a ‘Carrie Underwood, Jazmine Sullivan or Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale’ moment in a relationship? LOL.” —R.T. If you’re out of the loop about the pop-culture references above, RT is asking if, in a fit of brokenhearted, bruised-ego anger, I’ve ever damaged someone’s property as revenge. My…

TMZ and CNN are reporting that several of Martin Luther King Jr.’s siblings and grandchildren were in a vehicle accident when the driver of their charter bus hit the brakes to avoid striking a van that had run a red light. The incident occurred as the family finished observing the 50th anniversary of the March on…

At Clutch magazine, Britni Danielle challenges cultural appropriation in a piece about a woman who grew up white in Mexico but was seen as a woman of color when she moved to the U.S. But “being white excludes her from being a woman of color. Period,” she writes. I recently stumbled across an interesting essay by…

Citing the backup dancers on display during Miley Cyrus’ MTV Video Music Awards twerking debacle, Tressie McMillan Cottom argues at her blog, tressiemc.com, that whites have long viewed black women as freak show attractions. She frames the spectacle against the backdrop of anti-black-female themes in American culture. Cyrus’ dancers look more like me than they do Rihanna…

Ben S. Carson, a professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, writes at the Washington Times that although blacks have made tremendous strides since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the civil rights leader would be disheartened by the epidemic of “black-on-black violent crime” and the erosion of family values in the…

Nearly 50 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his call for justice from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “tens of thousands reconvened near that spot Wednesday, under cloudy skies and amid hope and frustration about the current state of race relations in America,” the Washington Post reports. At 3 p.m.,…

(The Root) — For much of the last month, dozens of media outlets have told the story of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. We know of the major organizers — Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and others —…

Timothy Hill, the brother of Michael Brandon Hill, who was armed when he entered a Georgia school last week, says President Barack Obama should be more focused on preventing such incidents rather than calling to thank the bookkeeper at the school who thwarted a potential mass shooting, according to Clutch magazine. Antoinette Tuff has likely been…

Aside from his lawyers’ fees, state law requires Florida to cover George Zimmerman’s legal costs because he was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Orlando Sentinel reports. That includes the cost of expert witnesses, travel, depositions, photocopies, even that animated 3-D video that defense attorneys showed jurors during closing argument that depicts…