culture

Fast-food workers feel overworked and underpaid, according to a piece at the New York Times, but the news is that several of these low-wage workers in the New York metropolitan area are not afraid to speak up about their experiences in an effort to push for change. Last week a City Council fact-finding panel listened…

Last year New York City reported its lowest homicide rate since the Police Department started tracking it 50 years ago. Officials say the city’s stop-and-frisk policy has played a large role. It allows officers to stop and search anyone they believe is suspicious. But an editorial in the Washington Post suggests that if changes aren’t…

July 5, 1975, is a noteworthy day in the annals of black sports. It was when Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win Wimbledon, according to Sports Mole, which reports that it was all the more incredible that the 31-year-old Ashe was up against 22-year-old Jimmy Connors, the title holder at the time.…

Blogging at For Harriett, Tyler Young writes that BET’s Being Mary Jane will likely become a hit because the character’s story is familiar to so many women of color, who are trying to do their best while confronting life’s challenges. … I am not sure who’s been peeping inside my window at night but it has got to…

Happily single Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, writes at CNN that while it may be cute for teenagers to text their sweethearts all day and night, that’s really no way for intelligent, confident adults to communicate. She says real men talk — they do not text. As a happily single woman,…

(The Root) — You can read this essay in its entirety — plus the thoughts of 40 other prominent African Americans from the worlds of the arts, medicine, religion and academia — in the anthology Where Did Our Love Go: Love and Relationships in the African American Community, available online and wherever books are sold.…

In a piece at NorthJersey.com, Mark C. Alexander, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, writes that by gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has spun a mythical America that is not representative of the world in which we live. He says “their foray into fantasy does damage that may not be…

(The Root) — “I have both maternal and paternal DNA test done by African Ancestry.com. The two tribes indicated in the results point to my maternal roots being Fulani and my paternal roots Ibo, both from Nigeria. Can you suggest which records/archives I can continue my search? “My mother had a middle name she did…

(The Root) — A lot has changed since 1903, when W.E.B. Du Bois described black Americans as possessing what he called a “double consciousness,” caught between a self-conception as Americans and as people of African descent. As he put it in The Souls of Black Folk: “The Negro ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro;…

Most people would say a therapist’s office is a safe place to talk about anything. But what happens when discrimination and racism get in the way? A story in Psychology Today discusses how racism can influence mental trauma and how therapists can exacerbate the problem with their comments to clients. Insensitive remarks can be particularly…