culture

“Another day in Florida” is how the Daily News put it in recounting the shooting of 60-year-old Roy Howard Middleton, a black man who was shot in the leg by police last weekend outside his home in Warrington, Fla., as he went to collect a pack of cigarettes from his mother’s car. Two Escambia County…

Cheryl Boone Isaacs, a marketer and longtime Hollywood insider, has been elected the first African-American president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that gives out the Oscars each year, the Los Angeles Times reports. Isaacs, a longtime academy insider who most recently held the job of first vice president, will serve a…

President Obama’s recent comment that America’s growing income inequality is “morally wrong” led CNN‘s John D. Sutter to explore whether income inequality is, in fact, a question of morality. He asked four experts with differing views for their perspectives. It’s getting harder to shock people with stats about income inequality. Americans know they live in…

In a piece for the Feminist Wire, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan advises black people on how to deal with these tough times, when even white people are talking about race and racism — and probably talking about it to you. – Racism will make you angry. You knew this already — you know the heat that…

As cable-news pundits make the rounds discussing black-on-black violence, in a piece for Gawker, Cord Jefferson argues that white-on-white crime is a problem, too, and points out that crimes committed by whites . Accompanying Jefferson’s article is a video of white surfers rioting in Huntington Beach, Calif. Many people don’t want to hear this kind…

(The Root) —Don Lemon, one of CNN’s highest-profile black anchors, triggered a recent firestorm of anger and recrimination when he suggested that African Americans should alter their personal behavior if they want to achieve racial equality. Lemon’s efforts at tough love admonished young black men for wearing baggy pants, castigated hip-hop for romanticizing prison culture,…

(The Root) — It’s been 20 years since we graduated from Hillman College on A Different World, which went off the air in the summer of 1993. The show, which began as a spinoff of The Cosby Show, was supposed to follow the exploits of Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet). But when Bonet dropped out after…

Oscar Grant’s father will be allowed to sue Johannes Mehserle, the Northern California transit officer who shot and killed his 22-year-old son, now that an appellate court has upheld a lower court’s ruling that the shooting was indeed involuntary manslaughter. The 2009 shooting of Grant has gained renewed attention in light of Trayvon Martin’s shooting…

Michael David Dunn has pleaded “not guilty” to murder in the shooting death of Jordan Russell Davis, a 17-year-old African-American high school student, during an incident at a Florida gas station last year.  The shooting is gaining nationwide attention because of its similarities to the Trayvon Martin shooting. NBC News reports:  A Florida gun collector has pleaded…