We don’t know the exact date when the great and powerful Harriet Tubman (ca. 1820-1913) came into this temporal world, but we do know when she left it. One hundred years ago on this day, Harriet Tubman exhaled her final breath and spoke her last words to those at her side: “I go away to [...]
Well, not really. What Steve Hannah, CEO for The Onion, the popular satirical news source (otherwise known as “America’s Finest News Source”), actually did was issue an apology to Quvenzhane Wallis after an immediate backlash on social media greeted an inappropriate tweet from The Onion‘s live Twitter feed during the Academy Awards telecast Sunday night. [...]
(Beware: Spoilers below) I was hesitant to see Django Unchained, having read an earlier script floating around the Internet, until actress Kerry Washington said this about her role as long-suffering slave and love interest, Broomhilda: Look I can see how it’s not particularly feminist to play the princess in the tower, waiting to be saved. [...]
You know things seem dire for women when you find yourself revisiting Andrea Dworkin. Not the Dworkin who’s often misquoted as saying, “All heterosexual sex is rape,” but the Dworkin who once said this: Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you [men]? It’s not because there’s a [...]
During this past week of presidential politics, the contrast in depictions of black women in the public sphere couldn’t have been more striking. On one end was the dignified, eloquent First Lady Michelle Obama, universally praised for her speech at the Democratic National Convention. On the opposite end was rapper Nicki Minaj seemingly “betraying” her [...]
On first sight, it’s pretty clear why Afro-Swedish male artist Makode Linde‘s performance art piece “Painful Cake,” which premiered at Sweden’s Moderna Museet for World Art Day last week, struck many people as just plain wrong. The performance featured a black-iced cake in a caricature of an African woman’s torso, complete with protuberant breasts and [...]
I must commend Sandra Fluke, like so many others have already done, for rightly condemning “shock jock” Rush Limbaugh’s efforts in silencing women who dare to speak publicly about sexual politics by calling them “sluts.” The furor over Limbaugh’s slut-shaming tactics, however, seems to underlie a different anxiety that is more than just outrage over [...]
Today, on the final day of Black Herstory Month, I honor my favorite black woman of history: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), married name Wells-Barnett, fierce, articulate, determined, courageous and completely uncompromising in her fight for racial and gender justice. And she did most of her fighting with a pen, as she was best known for [...]
As Oscar weekend approaches, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are the favorites, respectively, to win this year’s Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards. Having two black women poised to sweep the actress Oscars might seem like progress for Hollywood–but here’s the irony: The parts they are nominated for, from the box-office hit The Help, are [...]
On February 18–which is the 81st birthday of Toni Morrison–let’s also remember Margaret Garner, a slave woman whose herstory was memorialized in what is often considered Morrison’s greatest work: the 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, later made into a film produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Morrison, the author of nine novels (with a tenth, Home, [...]
