Category: KOLUMN Magazine

— DINO-RAY RAMOS, DEADLINE Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins took to social media to share a hauntingly beautiful look at his upcoming Amazon limited series The Underground Railroad based on based on Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for fiction. Jenkins posted the video on Twitter with the caption “We the People…” The stunning teaser trailer pans across a sea of gorgeous Black […]

As the US philosopher and civil rights activist looks ahead to the presidential election, he discusses Joe Biden, Black Lives Matter and why Barack Obama was more Kenny G than John Coltrane — HUGH MUIR, THE GUARDIAN Cornel West is a thinker. Readers of Prospect magazine recently voted him the world’s fourth-best thinker. And right now […]

Jaguar talks to the Black women who laid the foundations for the house music scene as we know it today — JAGUAR, MIXMAG Giving a voice to the marginalised is vital and representation is key in developing a more equal and just world. I try to push this in everything I do: with my BBC […]

The ballot initiative, supported by police, corporations, and even big grocery chains, would use more taxpayer money to incarcerate people, rather than invest in other social services. — RAY LEVY UYEDA, THE APPEAL A proposition on California’s November ballot could weaken years of reforms to the state’s criminal legal system by reclassifying misdemeanor theft charges […]

The initiative will target 25 counties and 250,000 Black residents in urban areas including Broward and Miami-Dade County. — BET STAFF, BET Media mogul Tyler Perry is helping to fund a $500,000 mobilization effort in Florida targeting Black voters in the key battleground state. He joins many prominent Black celebrities who are actively helping Black communities ahead of the […]

EXCLUSIVE: MGM has set a Sammy Davis Jr. biopic that will be based on Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father, a 1996 book written by Davis’ daughter Tracey Davis and Dolores A. Barclay. Studio has Hillman Grad’s Lena Waithe and Rishi Rajani producing with Sight Unseen’s Julia Lebedev and Eddie Vaisman. David Matthews is writing the script. — MIKE FLEMING, DEADLINE The project reunites Waithe with MGM’s Pamela Abdy, […]

Nigerian animator Ridwan Moshood was so determined to learn how to make cartoons, he spent hours in internet cafés in Lagos, watching YouTube lessons and taking notes. — VIVIENNE NUNUS & SARAH TREANOR, BBC NEWS “I would go to a cyber café, watch video tutorials and write down whatever I’d learnt,” he says. Today, the […]

— CHRIS KING, THE ST. LOUIS AMERICAN When thinking of wine, we tend to think of red wine and white wine. Phil Long, however, makes it his mission to get people thinking about – and drinking – Black wine. Long is president of the Association of African American Vintners (AAAV). Of its 21 members, two-thirds […]

Behind every great feat in the public record lies an untold story of the unsung foot soldiers. — NATALIE HOPKINSON, THE NEW YORK TIMES Just over 25 years ago, Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, realized he needed help in his quixotic quest to summon a million Black men to the National […]

It’s long been accepted that the slur shouldn’t be used by white people to refer to black people. What about referring to the word itself? — JOHN MCWHORTER, THE ATLANTIC Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist […]