Tag: Black women
Why dream hampton Won’t Give Up on Hip-Hop
One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a
‘Working Class’ Does Not Equal ‘White’
That the words working class are synonymous in the minds of many Americans with white working class is the result of a political myth. As the award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley explains in her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Black people are more likely to be working-class than white people are.
Kelley’s Black Folk opens our minds up to Black workers, narrating their complex lives over 200 years of American history. Kelley looks
Tracy Chapman and a Country-Music Controversy
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What is the most constructive way for the press to cover race if its objectives include accurately informing citizens about the past and the present––no matter how awful or uncomfortable––and refraining from framing the news in ways that are needlessly polarizing or
Review: ‘The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family’
“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide. One can see in the
The Hidden Strain of Being an Interracial Couple on Reality TV
In the first season of Netflix’s hit reality show Love Is Blind, Lauren Speed visits the Atlanta home of her new fiancé, Cameron Hamilton. The house is airy and bright, and Lauren and Cameron, fingers laced, wander the rooms imagining the life they might have there together. But behind the scenes, that day was less dreamy than it looked.
A producer urged Lauren to peek inside Cameron’s fridge and pantry so the crew could film her commenting on what
Buffalo Shows the Double Terror of Being Black
I loved strawberry shortcake as a child in New York City. The sliced strawberries, the juice, the softest of cake, that whipped cream. I loved it all individually. And together? Pure bliss.
Celestine Chaney loved strawberry shortcake too. A 65-year-old mother and grandmother of six, Chaney took strawberry-shortcake making to another level. She’d buy “those little cake cups,” her son, Wayne Jones, told The Buffalo News. “You cut the strawberries up, sprinkle sugar over them, and leave in the
Domestic Labor: The Most Essential Work, the Lowest Pay
About a year into the pandemic, at an emotional low, I entered the hours I spent caring for my family and our home into the online Invisible Labor Calculator to see how much my work might be worth. It was created by the journalist Amy Westervelt, who used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to assign an hourly wage to different tasks—cleaning, considering the emotional needs of family members, doing yard work, cooking, etc. I was floored when the calculator told
Black Hair and the Revolution at Soul Scissors
What seemed like an eternity ended at 13. I decided that was the appropriate age to swap my fat pigtails out for a fantastic, fluffy ’fro. In lieu of a debutante cotillion or other social ritual, the coming-out of my hair would mark my transition from girl to teenager. An afro, my afro, would also serve as a talisman of acceptance—indisputable evidence that, no matter my light-skinned flesh nor the thousand shades of blond in my thick hair, I was
Tumblr Is Everything – The Atlantic
The CEO of Tumblr—a social platform that was once worth more than $1 billion, and in its time was among the internet’s most popular and talked-about cultural spaces—quietly worked his last day on January 21. The company has not explained Jeff D’Onofrio’s departure, nor even referenced it publicly; I learned about it incidentally, several weeks after speaking with him, in a “wanted to let you know” email from a company spokesperson. Five days after that, Matt Mullenweg, whose company, Automattic,
The Judge Who Told the Truth About the Mississippi Abortion Ban
Of all the arguments that animate the anti-abortion cause, two stand out as particularly far-fetched: that banning abortion protects women’s health and shields African Americans from genocide. Yet for years, these arguments have driven debates over state laws, served as justifications for court decisions upholding those laws, and even appeared on billboards warning women in predominantly Black communities not to kill their babies. Three years ago, Mississippi lawmakers prohibited almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy to save