by Guest Contributor Bao Phi, originally published at Your Voices/The Star Tribune

UP IN ARMS: A Night of Hip Hop and Spoken Word to Honor Fong Lee and End Police Brutality
Saturday, October 3rd, 8 p.m. (doors at 7:30)
Kagin Commons at Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105
Featuring performances by Magnetic North (NY), Nomi of Power [...]

By Guest Contributor Jen, originally published at Disgrasian
There are things I can’t stop thinking about in the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le.

Like the fact that she was 4′11″ and 90 lbs, which seems oh-so-small.
And that she was killed in the middle of the day.
The fact everyone now knows and finds particularly cruel: that [...]

by Guest Contributor Dany Sigwalt
Rumors are flying about Michael Vick’s future in the NFL. He has been conditionally reinstated to the NFL, and is now looking for a new home team.
Michael Vick, of course, was the NFL superstar quarterback who was charged as a “key figure” in April of 2007 of an extensive [...]

by Latoya Peterson

E! news has the video, where Brown directly addresses the camera.

In the video, he mentions he has apologized to Rihanna “countless” times and wishes he could relive the events of the evening. He notes that he is still not permitted to go into what happened, but feels it is more [...]

by Guest Contributor Catherine A. Traywick, originally published at Femmalia
Two weeks after the much-publicized death of Iranian protester, Neda — whose final moments were famously captured by a cell phone camera and distributed the world over — a couple dozen performers put together a music video tribute slash “non-violent resistance” anthem filmed (appropriately?) with nothing [...]

by Guest Contributor (and regular commenter) Joseph Shahadi, originally published at Vs. The Pomegranate

Michael Jackson is dead.
My reaction is complicated. On Facebook my high school classmates and I are mourning Michael Jackson and sharing memories. Claudia wrote, “I remember when someone brought the Thriller video to school and there was a ‘viewing’ before 1st [...]

by Latoya Peterson
This morning, I was invited on The Takeaway to discuss Chris Brown. You can listen to the show here. Below is a quick summary:

Singer Chris Brown plead guilty yesterday to felony assault charges. Prosecutors say he badly beat his ex-girlfriend (pop star Rihanna Fenty) in February. Today on The Takeaway we [...]

by Guest Contributor Tami, originally published at What Tami Said
On May 13, 2008, I wrote:
Saturday night I was watching as CNN covered the tragedy in Myanmar (Burma). I was well aware of the devastation caused by Nagris, the cyclone that ripped the country apart. What shocked me was the graphic nature of CNN’s report. There [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

For a short period of time when she was a child, Latifah was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a teenager charged with her care. “He violated me,” she says of the abuser. “I never told anybody; I just buried it as deeply as I could and [...]

by Latoya Peterson

On Friday, I was in transit when I saw the message pop up on Thea’s twitterfeed:

White NYC cop fatally shoots black NYC cop, mistaking him for an armed criminal: http://bit.ly/QXgtq Aiyeee. (thanks @sunnykins)11:23 AM May 29th from web
Damn, really?
The New York Times has the scoop:
A New York City police officer who had [...]

by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller
The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a [...]

by Guest Contributor Cara, originally published at The Curvature

I just came across a post at Sociological Images about an outrageously racist flash video game called Border Patrol. They note that in the game, “you try to keep three types of Mexicans from crossing the border: drug dealers, Mexican nationalists, and ‘breeders.’” Video game [...]

by Guest Contributor M.Dot, originally published at Model Minority

I was riding through Ohio the other day on a road trip to Michigan.
Filthy was looking for NPR but we settled on the Michael Baisden show. I was intrigued because the show was about whether a woman, a wife, has the right to “Go on Strike” and [...]

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea Plaid
I give mad kudos to Cara for her smartly written analysis about Lil’ Wayne having his rape exploited as talk-show fodder on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. She said a lot of what I was thinking when I saw the clip. She felt her thoughts were “long and wandering”, but she sorted through [...]

by Guest Contributor Fiqah, originally published at Possum Stew
*Trigger Warning*

I don’t know how to tell you this. There’s so much I can’t say.
I didn’t want to write this ever. I wanted to forget today even happened at all. I wanted to continue on with my shit today and ignore the incident guiding my [...]