Fashion Spiece

* This article was originally published here

* This article was originally published here

Grammy-nominated rapper Cordae has partnered with Disney Dreamers Academy and The Undefeated to award scholarships to students attending historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Established by Walt Disney World in 2008, Disney Dreamers Academy is an annual four-day program that brings Black teens from across the United States to Walt Disney World Resort for a free, immersive education and mentoring experience. The academy’s mission is to inspire, motivate and encourage teens to pursue their dreams. Each class of 100 teens is selected from thousands of applicants. Music for the Movement Volume III – Liberated , which will be released Friday, is the third volume in a four-part series of EPs honoring Black lives and social justice under a joint venture between Disney Music Group and The Undefeated. Cordae teamed up with Grammy and Oscar winner Common to record a single for the EP titled, “What’s Life.” Cordae wants to donate his proce...

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My last few exhibitions, starting in 2015, have conveyed the thoughts I’ve had about the country being at a major crossroads since before the 2016 presidential election. At that time, as a highly perceptive and analytical person, I already had a feeling in my gut that the country was about to make some serious missteps, and I knew it wouldn’t bode well for the majority of who call this country home or seek to call it home. With each of those exhibitions, the title contained some reference to a “parallel universe” of my imagination that allows me to metaphorically remove myself from this current reality for my own sanity. Each body of work included constructed “devices” which, in concept and intent, would allow me to access spirits or beings of a higher consciousness to help me generate and maintain positive energy in order to keep moving forward. One of my favorites from the series is the Spirit Selector . I compare the way I conceive of and crea...

Clarence Williams III was an actor’s actor whose career spanned seven decades across multiple genres and stages. On June 4, he died at the age of 81, leaving a dynamic legacy in his wake. But if Mr. Simms, the demonic character Williams portrayed in 1995’s Tales from the Hood , was my horrifying introduction to his career, it’s the real-life manner of how Williams died and its prevalence within the Black community that’s even scarier. Colon cancer, the second-deadliest of its kind, gravely and disproportionately impacts Black people. Statistics from the American Cancer Society reveal Black folks are not only 20% more likely to get colon cancer, but also 40% more likely to die from it. My uncle was 42 when he lost his battle with colon cancer. Almost 10 months ago, Chadwick Boseman , at 43, lost his life to the same illness that claimed Williams, who was nearly double his age. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized how Black men...

LeBron James’ summer will look a little different this year after he exited the playoffs in the opening round, marking an early end to the Los Angeles Lakers’ 2020 title defense. In the 18th campaign of his NBA career, he missed more games with a high ankle sprain – 26 – than he ever has in a single season. But the NBA superstar actually has a new team. “I’m gonna let the ankle rest for about a month, and then I’m gonna gear up with Lola, Taz, Granny, Bugs and the rest of the crew. I’m gonna play for the Tune Squad this summer instead of the Olympics,” joked James after the Lakers dropped their first-round playoff series to the Phoenix Suns, with a 113-100 Game 6 loss on June 3. He’s not leaving the Lakers, but he’ll be joining a roster of cartoon characters in the lead role of Space Jam: A New Legacy, the Warner Bros. reboot of the Michael Jordan-led classic Space Jam , which hit theaters almost 25 years ago. N...

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At 106 years old, Lessie Benningfield Randle is pleading for anyone to listen. To listen to the pain and heartbreak of what happened 100 years ago in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. To listen to what happened to hundreds of Black families and their descendants since that night. A century later, the Greenwood District of Tulsa has yet to fully recover. Randle, known as “Mother Randle,” was 6 years old the night of May 31, 1921, when a white mob, which included city officials, terrorized, attacked and killed Black people in the Greenwood District after a false claim of a white woman being assaulted by a Black man. Before that night, Tulsa was held in high esteem as a burgeoning Black community and was recognized nationally for its business and residential prosperity, which resulted in the district being known as the “Black Wall Street.” The impact of that night has been felt for generations. No one was charged for the nearly 300 deaths, 1,400 ho...

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Howard University’s decision to close its small classics department may seem like an unusual piece of education news to attract widespread media attention, especially when student debt is at an all-time high, racism and free speech on campus are constantly being debated, and finances are tight in many colleges and universities across the country. Yet some of our country’s most well-known thinkers, such as Cornel West, have written about how useful classics – the study of Greek and Roman languages, literature and history – is at a historically Black college and university. A petition drive by current and former students of the program tried to reverse the decision and gathered more than 5,000 signatures . Clearly, people care. In almost every way, the decision to dismantle the classics department is a new phase of the same educational debates that raged in the 19th and early 20th centuries about the “Negro problem.” As John C. Shields wrote i...

As he dribbled three times to his right in the waning seconds of his very first playoff game 10 days ago, Trae Young released an arcing floater with just 0.9 seconds on the clock to seal the Atlanta Hawks’ opening-round win against the New York Knicks. The shot silenced a rowdy crowd at Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks were hosting their first playoff game since 2013. The most unexpected part of the play? Maybe it was the shoes: a pair of gleaming, orange sneakers that the third-year point guard laced up for his playoff debut a full four months earlier than expected. Dubbed the Trae Young 1, they’re his first signature shoe with Adidas and bring the Hawks guard into an elevated tier of NBA star players with their own shoe. “Obviously, the shoe doesn’t come out for a little bit for everybody to get it. But I really wanted to play in it,” Young said in a news conference after Game 2. For decades, the signature sneaker process has f...

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At just 32, Clint Smith has already become a nationally recognized name through his poetry collection, Counting Descent, and his work as a staff writer at The Atlantic. He’s also a colleague who I befriended while we were studying at Davidson College. Over the years, Smith has considered the ways in which the legacies of slavery have influenced everything from the prison industrial complex to infrastructure bills. This year, he’s taking on his biggest project yet with the release of his debut nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which took Smith from Civil War reenactments in Virginia to Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and even slave castles in Senegal to show how we consume, distort and can reshape our paths forward by being honest about our pasts. It’s coming out at a prescient time where America is realizing how much of our history and our nation’s most valorized leaders have been romanti...