culture

Calling it a “historic moment,” Spike Lee took to YouTube to thank fans and Jesus after reaching his goal of $1.25 million on Kickstarter, which was met Friday with five days remaining in the month-long campaign. Mashable reports. The distinguished filmmaker even dropped a few f-bombs out of excitement while thanking fans and Jesus. He…

The Huffington Post is reporting that the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan has rescinded an invitation to Alice Walker to attend its 50th anniversary next year. Officials may have been prompted by her past criticism of Israel, says the Pulitizer Prize-winning author. On her blog, Walker posted a letter she said…

In his first sit-down interview about the “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” debacle, Russell Simmons tells BRKDWN host Cynthia LuCiette that he pulled the video after black women schooled him on how much pain it caused. “This is about black women — and they can push me around a little quicker than the rest of the…

(The Root) — On the long list of rhetorical questions that remain perpetually unanswerable, the problem of whether or not women can “have it all” is right there at the top. Adding to this never-ending debate is a recent New York Times Magazine article that checked in with a group of women who a decade…

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the airwaves on Friday to blast a Manhattan federal judge who ruled that the city’s controversial stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional, according to the New York Post. Public safety “is now in the hands of some woman who does not have the expertise to do it,” he told listeners during…

Mother Jones reports that 58-year-old “Ms. Ruth,” who comes from five generations of Ku Klux Klan members, sews hoods and robes for the group seven days a week, and blesses each one when it’s done. She lives in the Deep South. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter,…

CNN‘s L.Z. Granderson says a Tennessee judge overstepped her bounds when she ordered a mother to change her son’s name from Messiah. “Ultimately what we name our children is no one else’s business,” he writes, and it’s certainly not something in which the government should be involved. In an egregious abuse of power, Lu Ann Ballew,…

Aura Bogado at the Nation exhorts white feminists to stop exploiting the painful experiences of black women for their benefit. Provoked by the popular Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, she writes that a white woman’s “prison stint can never be a substitute for the violence institutionally carried out against women of color in…

Writing at his Hutchinson Report News, Earl Ofari Hutchinson says that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is failing miserably at his mission to improve minority outreach and eradicate racism in his party because, well, racists abound. Priebus could save his breath. A few choice and timely words against a loose cannon congressman, and a…

Forty-three-year-old Carlos Alcis’ family says he was literally scared to death when New York City police officers entered his home chasing a cellphone thief, the Daily News reports. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office on Friday announced an investigation into the incident, which occurred Thursday. Word of the DA’s probe emerged Friday just before police arrested…