culture

During a recent wide-ranging interview with C-SPAN, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took a swipe at President Barack Obama’s popularity among elites and the media, saying that Obama says “the prescribed things they expect from a black person,” Fox News reports. “Any black person who says something that is not the prescribed things that they…

Embattled former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. may follow the path of other fallen Illinois lawmakers and public servants, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. That is, he will reportedly ask a federal judge for leniency on his sentence because of his mental health, the paper says. But prosecutors are skeptical and want to have their own experts…

Kobe Bryant and his mother, Pamela Bryant, are reportedly locked in a battle over his memorabilia, including his old jerseys, varsity letters from high school, championship rings and trophies, TMZ reports. Pamela reportedly took the items to an auction house, saying that her son had passed them on to her, and received a $450,000 advance,…

(The Root) — It’s been a tough week for PepsiCo. Earlier this week, they had to pull an ad created by Odd Future member Tyler, The Creator, due to complaints that its content was racist and insensitive toward women. Today, according to the Associated Press, the company dropped Lil Wayne for a controversial lyric in…

Cory Booker has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter. That’s impressive by any measure, but when you consider Newark, N.J., the city of which he is mayor, has a population a quarter of that size, you understand why he is known by many as America’s Mayor. Booker, even in the world of politics, is…

It’s hard to accept, but the wealth gap is not a mistake, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes at The Atlantic. I spent the last week interviewing men and women, and the children of men and women, who bought their homes on contract in Chicago during the 1950s. Contract buying sprang up in Chicago after the federal government…

(Special to The Root) — William Henry Dorsey never imagined that there would be a National Scrapbooking Day (May 4), and most present-day scrapbookers have probably never heard of Dorsey. But Dorsey, the son of an escaped slave, was one of the most prolific scrapbook makers in the United States. He was born in 1837…

Colorlines‘ Akiba Solomon profiles a pro-life effort that she says is fueled mostly by suburban white evangelicals and conservative black men. In some ways, Care Net’s Kansas City operation is neither unique nor new. For nearly 20 years, the evangelical anti-abortion movement has used standalone crisis pregnancy centers to dissuade girls and women from ending…

In a piece for the New Yorker, Charlayne Hunter-Gault chronicles the day in 1963 when children as young as 6 marched in Birmingham, Ala., to protest segregation. One of the Children’s Crusaders was Janice Wesley Kelsey, who was in the eleventh grade when she was arrested along with hundreds of other students. She spent four…

(The Root) — When White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett spoofs your television show at the prestigious White House Correspondents’ Dinner, you know you’ve made it. For Mahershala Ali, who plays the wily Remy Danton on the Netflix series House of Cards, it’s been a long road. “I am beginning to reap the benefits of…