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For New Showrunner Erica Shelton Kodish, Being Mary Jane Is Personal
Editor’s note: Because of President Barack Obama’s farewell address, Being Mary Jane will air at 10 p.m. ET on Jan. 10 and return to its regular 9 p.m. ET schedule next week. When it was announced that husband-and-wife creative duo Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil had scored a new development deal and would be…
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Get Away From Reality With These 5 Inauguration Day Escapes
We can’t escape the reality that Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. And although the last few months have felt like the end of the world as we know it, we can literally escape watching, hearing about or even giving a second thought to the Trump inauguration in Washington,…
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President Obama Pens 55-Page Article on Criminal Justice for Harvard Law Review
President Barack Obama returned to his Harvard Law Review roots (he was the first black president of the 100-plus-year-old journal in his last year at the school) as he penned a 55-page-article on our justice system, how his administration has moved the needle and how far we have to go to make substantive change. Entitled…
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Ala.’s Black Belt Hit Hard by Voter-Suppression Measures
Voter suppression is alive and well, and a case in Alabama’s Black Belt proves it. When the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced the closure of 31 driver’s license offices in 2015, a journalist in the state showed that the state’s “Black Belt”— the region of Alabama that takes its name first from the color of its…
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Colin Kaepernick Donates Huge Sneaker Collection to Bay Area Orphanages, Shelters
San Francisco backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has stood for the sanctity of black lives by kneeling during the national anthem, is giving away at least a portion of his colossal footwear collection to Bay Area homeless shelters and orphanages, according to a video posted on Instagram by his girlfriend, DJ Nessa. Kaepernick, who is…
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What's Ailing Bishop Eddie Long?
I’m concerned about Bishop Eddie Long. In August of 2016, Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, went viral after video showed that he’d lost an alarming amount of weight. “People are asking, ‘Bishop, what happened to all of you?’” he said on a video posted to Facebook that has since been taken…
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Sam’s Club’s 1st Black CEO, Rosalind Brewer, Steps Down
Rosalind Brewer, the first woman and the first African American to head Sam’s Club, stepped down from her position Friday, reports Fortune. After five years at the helm of Sam’s Club, Brewer will be replaced by John Furner, Sam’s Club’s chief merchant. Although Brewer said she is leaving the $57 billion-a-year company because “she wants…
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Dylann Roof Wears Racist Symbols on Shoes in Court
Dylann Roof, who was convicted in December of killing nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C.’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, has been wearing shoes adorned with racist symbols to court as recently as Monday, the Daily Beast reports. Roof, who is representing himself in the murder trial and who testified that he has…
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Throwing Shade at Throwing Shade: How TV Land’s New Show Leeches Off Black Gay Culture
I imagine that Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi are lovely white people, but that doesn’t make the formal rollout of their new TV Land late-night show Throwing Shade any less grating. And before anyone else mentions it for the umpteenth time: Yes, plenty of us are well aware that these two have been using that…
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Black LGBT Ministers Speak Out About Kim Burrell, Shirley Caesar
The community is still reeling after a silent churchgoer put Kim Burrell’s violently homophobic sermon on blast for the world to see. Burrell’s tirade—which featured vulgar remarks about gay and lesbian sex and a warning that they would “die in 2017”—led Ellen DeGeneres to cancel the scheduled talk show performance of the gospel singer’s song…
