Over the weekend, President Obama took time out of addressing graduates at the celebrated, historically-black, all-male, private college, Morehouse, to remind about black men who make bad choices, chalking up failures to The Man and myriad other excuses. “We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. Growing up, I made…
Over the last week, Kelly Rowland has received so much praise after voicing her trials and tribulations in her new single, Dirty Laundry You’ve probably heard the song by now, but if not, here’s a recap: A) Kelly talks about her abusive relationship: “Hitting the window like it was me / And still it…
Nancy Ditomaso on The New York Times Opinotator blog writes how “Black” Twitter and your Facebook friends who put extra sayings in their names like Natasha Ohsofine Washington, are not helping you get a job. This is because they don’t know anyone. This is unlike your friends on “White” Twitter and their Facebook friends who don’t have clever handles because they might know someone…
“As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp,” Snoop Lion states in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine. “I dreamed of having cars and clothes and bitches to match. I said, ‘Fuck it – I’m finna do it.’” And so during his Playboy Tour in 2003, he utilized his fame, money and power to, in…
My relationship with my mother has evolved over the last few decades. We have grown close to grow apart again to become best friends. As our relationship has morphed and matured, so have her views on me being a lesbian. I grew up in a Catholic household in the Caribbean and many of those traditions…
MTV’s Teen Mom Farrah Abraham recently dethroned Kim Kardashian in a record debut of her sex tape, “Backdoor Teen Mom” with Vivid Entertainment. In less than twelve hours, the 16 & Pregnant newly-minted porn star garnered 2 million views, crushing Kim K.’s 600,000 twelve-hour debut, proving that the strategic “sex tape for fame” move is alive and…
As controversy surrounding the now infamous Mountain Dew ad created by Odd Future front-man, Tyler, The Creator, gained in intensity, in large part due to my friend and colleague, Dr. Boyce Watkins, labeling it “the most racist ad in history,” the many varied and nuanced responses to it began to form their own separate story….
Dueling narratives surround Assata Shakur, a political figure who found herself returned to the national spotlight after the FBI officially added her to their Most Wanted Terrorists list on May 2, 2013. To mainstream media, Joanne Chesimard murdered a police officer and fled to Cuba to escape justice. A New York Times article on the…
It was 1:30 in the afternoon but in my little corner of the world, it might as well have been 1:30 in the wee hours of the morning. I was wading through pages of content and research I’d compiled for a paper I was writing for African Aesthetics, a graduate class I needed to pull…
There was a moment last night during the latest episode of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta that further revealed how less and less the show cares about looking “real” and is about getting cool staged, stunt shots – like the kind you’d see in traditional, scripted television – to push the storyline. It involved a woman’s…
