culture

(The Root) — I had coffee with Mara Brock Akil years ago. I was in Los Angeles “taking meetings” about the possibility of optioning the rights to my book to a production company. When my agent asked whose work in Hollywood I trusted — not just admired — the most, Mara’s name flew out of…

While speaking on Smiley & West, his radio show with co-host Tavis Smiley, Cornel West praised the Supreme Court’s ruling last week on gay marriage but complained that “we black folk are just being pushed to the back of the bus in terms of our visibility,” the Washington Times reports. “We’re living in an age…

(The Root) — If you’re keeping score in the second-degree-murder trial of George Zimmerman, mark Tuesday’s court proceedings as a narrow victory for the prosecution. The exercise has no bearing on Zimmerman’s fate for fatally shooting Florida teen Trayvon Martin, of course. But after a few days of arguments in which defense attorneys neutralized the…

Like most mainstream reality-competition shows, Shark Tank on ABC seems to suffer from a lack of diversity, but the show’s producers, Mark Burnett and his company One Three Media, are determined to change that next season. On Aug. 23, casting directors will be on hand at the Kingonomics Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Investment Conference in Washington,…

The Butler has been one of this year’s most buzzed-about films. Posters and advertisements with the film’s title can be seen in theaters and on billboards. A trailer has already been released as well. But now the Weinstein Co., the studio in charge of releasing the film, will have to rethink one part of its strategy:…

Prada did something it hasn’t done in 19 years: cast a black model in one of its ads. Writing at Clutch magazine, Britni Danielle is not impressed and cautions fashion buyers and cultural critics against congratulating the fashion house for an occurrence that should happen more frequently, given the diversity that exists in the fashion consumer…

Writing at Very Smart Brothas, Damon Young says that there is an appropriate time and place to say the word “nigga,” and determining one’s audience is an integral part of figuring out when that time is.  Interestingly enough, my knowledge of and affinity for words could be an argument for not using some of them. Since there are…

(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.…

Author Stacy Parker Le Melle takes New York Times columnist David Brooks to task in a piece at the Huffington Post for using the term “mutts” in a recent op-ed. She argues that Brooks does not understand how hurtful the term is to multiracial people and encourages him to pay homage to the myriad cultures…