culture

(The Root) — Questions of racial identity and belonging have taken center stage this week with news that Karen Finney, political analyst and former deputy press secretary for Hillary Clinton, will host a new weekend show on MSNBC. In its announcement, MSNBC noted that Finney was the “first African-American spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.”…

ESPN’s Roxanne Jones says in a piece for CNN that firing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice will not take the brutality out of college sports. In fact, it just might pave the way for him to receive another job after he rehabilitates his reputation. Watching the video of Rice batter and berate his players, I…

Back in the day, neighbors and extended family helped raise children and set them on the right path when they went astray, San Francisco-based author Shawn Taylor recalls at Ebony. Today, much of the black community is splintered, and families have become more fractured and increasingly violence-prone. He asks where we should go next. ……

Business Insider is reporting that diversity in Silicon Valley has become a hot topic lately. In a one-and-a-half year long investigation, CNNMoney probed 20 of the most influential technology companies in the U.S. What they found: racial minorities and women are generally underrepresented in management roles. And those roles are typically dominated by white and…

First lady Michelle Obama’s slip of the tongue while promoting her Let’s Move! campaign, accidentally calling herself “a busy single mother,” continued to reverberate a day later. Proponents and opponents tried to analyze the statement, asking whether there is marital strife, pointing out the president’s public acknowledgment of another beautiful woman, along with a lot…

(The Root) — When Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert died on April 4 after a battle with cancer, a cross-cultural, countrywide coalition of fans expressed grief over the loss of the 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner. You didn’t have to be a Chicagoan to have heard of his work, which had a national audience. And…

CNN is reporting that a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., has ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after birth control pill available over the counter to people of any age without a prescription. This order overturned a 2011 decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to require a prescription for…

We all know that President Obama likes to joke, but did he cross the line when he praised the beauty of California Attorney General Kamala Harris? By now you may have heard that he called her “the best-looking attorney general” during remarks at a fundraiser in Atherton, Calif., according to ABC News. “You have to…

Writing at his blog, Earl Ofari Hutchinson lambastes critics of same-sex marriage who use the Bible to bolster their case, saying that scholars have written volumes debunking the passages because of errors and misinterpretations. The long standing reason for shoving the courts, the federal government and the states into the private relations between two adult consenting men…