culture

On Wednesday a federal judge sentenced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to 30 months in prison for misusing $750,000 in campaign funds, the Chicago Tribune reports. His wife, Sandi, received a sentence of one year after pleading guilty to falsifying tax returns. The Jacksons will be allowed to serve their sentences one at a time,…

(The Root) — On Aug. 28, 1963, there weren’t any youth organizations that had the resources to host events and sessions in tandem with what would become the iconic March on Washington. Nor was there a “Women of the Movement” symposium or a “Global Freedom Festival” designed to bring awareness to international issues in the…

After listening to a pastor’s remarks, the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart tries to dispel the seemingly unshakable belief among some religious leaders that “homosexuality is a sin and a choice.” He explains, rather, that it is a “God-given trait as immutable” as his skin color. I took a stand against religion-based anti-gay bigotry while sitting…

Responding to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that found that 40 percent of white people and 25 percent of nonwhites have no friends of another race, Brittney Cooper writes at Salon that it cuts both ways. “All of my close friends are black,” she says, explaining that maintaining white friendships is too much of a struggle.…

So many questions and very few answers have been doled out about the upcoming season of Scandal. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator, has remained mum on what we should expect when the third season begins Oct. 3, but in an interview on Vulture, she indulges Gladiators with a couple of small details, specifically about the…

Cory A. Booker, the charismatic and popular mayor of Newark, N.J., won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate on Tuesday with 60 percent of the vote, besting his closest challenger, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., the New York Times reports. Booker is favored to win the general election in October in the heavily Democratic state, which…

ESPN fired analyst Hugh Douglas a week after it was reported that he called co-host Michael Smith an Uncle Tom, Sports Illustrated reported on Tuesday. Asked Sunday by SI.com where the situation stood, ESPN spokesperson Rob Tobias said, “We are continuing to look into it and we expect a resolution this week.” That resolution has come…

(The Root) — These days, Deandre Poole spends more time than he’d like at home, staring at a computer screen, grading assignments and answering student questions for a communications course at Florida Atlantic University. “Teaching online is a new experience,” he told me Friday, on the phone from his home in South Florida. “It’s very…

Danielle T. Pointdujour writes at Ebony magazine about a woman who is having a baby with a man who happens to be her gay male BFF. The concept of “family” mystified me in my youth. Although people always talk of traditional families, it always seemed to me that there were slight variations on what “normal”…