culture

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…

Controversial scholar Cornel West has taken aim at civil rights leaders again. This time he hits them for ignoring “Wall Street criminality,” saying that money has corrupted American culture, according to the Raw Story. At book launching event on August 24 following the 50th Anniversary March on Washington, West condemned mainstream civil rights leaders for…

This New York Post story about Joel Donaldson, a 21-year-old man who attempted to rob a woman for her cellphone in broad daylight in Brooklyn, N.Y., has two lessons.  Joel Donaldson, 21, allegedly punched his victim in the face before snatching her phone at around 2:30 p.m. at Court and Remsen streets, just steps from…

In New York City, city lawyers report a sharp decrease in the number of stop-and-frisk encounters in the second quarter of 2013, according to the New York Times. The numbers are the lowest they have been since Mayor Michael Bloomberg started implementing the program 11 years ago. From April through June, police officers conducted 58,088 involuntary…