Culture Archives

  In a recent Jacobin article (reworked at Slate), Miya Tokumitsu argues that we should stop saying “do what you love,” (DWYL) because it “devalues actual work” and dehumanizes workers. Tokumitsu writes, By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving Read More

It’s a Friday in June. My homeboy told me about this one shop in the basement of an apartment building in Alexandria VA that’s supposed to be pretty good. It’s assumed that the only reason a woman, a black woman at that, cuts her hair is because of sickness or sorrow. I am squarely in Read More

When I say I hate you… this is what I mean. Well, first, let me clarify:  I hate bad spoken word.  The “I’m deep by sound and headwrap and ankh tattoo alone” spoken word.  The “as long as I say something about Africa, this is a good poem” spoken word.  The affected cadence.  The wildly Read More

Farhad Manjoo writes about how black people use Twitter, and, more specifically, the prevalence of black-created hashtags on the site: Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and Read More

Crossposted from TAPPED. On Tuesday, I wrote about President Obama’s visit to The View today and suggested he bring up his new initiative to fight the HIV/AIDS in the black community. But as I predicted, Obama did not mention it, nor did he confront host Sherri Shepherd for blaming high rates of HIV/AIDS in the black Read More

Yes, yes they are. Without going into details that might embarrass people I kinda know, the line “You’re just giving birth now/You’re not mother earth now/Now that you’re pregnant,” well, it really spoke to me.

Via TNC, Denzel says of the ladies who come to watch August Wilson’s Fences: “There are all these women coming to see me, to see this actor they like, and I appreciate that,” he said. “But at some shows, women are carrying on and snickering too much. Like at our Mother’s Day performance. Some audience Read More

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