black women

Writer-director Julie Dash returns to the Bechdel Test Canon with her 1982 short film Illusions, which asks some mighty big questions about the racial and sexual politics of constructing images and a film industry that finances the production of those images.

Brown vs. Board of Education—the Supreme Court decision that ruled school segregation unconstitutional—passed in 1954, but turning legislature into action took several years to transpire. It wasn’t until 1957 that nine black students, already enrolled at Little Rock Central High, began their first day of school, only to be met with an angry crowd and the Arkansas National Guard. The governor of Alabama, Orval Faubus (names don't get much more evil-sounding than that) prevented the students from entering the school. It took a presidential intervention on the part of Eisenhower to send the National Guard to escort the students. Behind the scenes though, was Daisy Bates.

Is your anti-abortion billboard targeting the African-American community just not cutting it? Here's one way to take things up a notch: presidential assassination!

There’s been an uproar in New York all this week about an anti-abortion billboard in Soho. The billboard featured a little black girl with the message, "The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb." Launched by anti-abortion group Life Always, the billboard served as a controversial way to bring attention to the fact that black women have a disproportionately high abortion rate in New York City and nationwide. While that’s clearly worrisome, suggesting that black women are a threat to black children for exercising their reproductive rights is extremely offensive. One of the top reasons women get abortions is because they can’t afford to raise children. Rather than address this dynamic as well as the disproportionate number of African Americans who lack health insurance, Life Always chose to publicly disparage black women.

Saturday Night Live’s "Bride of Blackenstein" skit did black women no favors. In this blaxploitation-like spoof of The Bride of Frankenstein, which aired Jan. 30, we learn that even a black chick created from scratch in a laboratory is demanding, bossy and built like an extra from the "Baby Got Back" video. Starring SNL guest host Jesse Eisenberg as Igor and musical guest Nicki Minaj as the Bride, the skit opens as the latter first emerges from her coffin:

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931, Toni Morrison is one of the most iconic literary figures of the twentieth century. She was born in Ohio, to which her parents, Ramah Willis Wofford and George Wofford, moved in order to escape the racist climate of the US South. I’ll be referring to her by the name by which she is known professionally, Toni Morrison, throughout this piece, but I want to point out that Toni is the nickname, and Chloe Wofford preferred. She writes a lot about being denied one’s true self, and, as naming is a powerful determinant here, I don’t care to be one to let this writer’s true self go unacknowledged. Morrison, then, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993–the eighth woman to be awarded this honour–and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Morrison’s services to literature have not just been through her own fiction, however; she’s edited writers such as Angela Davis, promoting black literature every which way she can.

In January, New Jersey-based business executive Neenah Picket, 43, rang in the New Year with a resolution: She would find a husband in 52 weeks with the help of six of her closest friends...and pretty much anyone who stops by her website, 52Weeks2FindHim.com. Now that much of the media hoopla around Neenah's experiment has died down, I thought I'd check in and see if she's found Him...or at the very least, if the trolls on her discussion board have stopped giving her unsolicited diet and exercise tips, calling her boring, and insulting her hairdo.

There are three books about black women and motherhood that rocked my world when I read them: Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood; I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work; and a novel, Jump at the Sun.  Lucky me, I also got to interview the authors, Cecelie S. Berry, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, and Kim McLarin, respectively.  Read on for those interviews and my reviews of the books...

Who is this woman? And why is she on Time's list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World?  Read on for the answers and for my look at the list, by the numbers.

 Mike Tyson's "confession", The Pocketbook Monologues, un-beweavable Oprah, Pulitzer winners, and Farai Chideya's "Kiss.."...