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We’re never short on entertainment material around here. It feels like our To Watch/Read list is always insurmountably long. But we figured, going into this weekend, why not throw some more recommendations onto the pile? We want to hear what you all are reading/watching/listening to/whatever else right now.

Here’s my current list to start things off:

• Watching: I just did a full re-watch of Playing House through Amazon Prime this week. It’s still one of the best depictions of female friendship on television ever.
• Reading: I’m slowly making my way through Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Carline Criado Perez. This book is fascinating and infuriating. It’s about how nearly every aspect of modern life that was designed to be universally accessible was actually designed using data for and from men, with the expectation that everything would work equally well for women. Spoiler: It doesn’t.
• Playing: I’m between video games right now! I need recommendations!
• Listening: I’m taking a break from my usual nonstop political podcasts and lightening things up with discussions of murder, courtesy of the women of Crime Junkie. On the music side, I can’t stop listening to Billie Eilish.

how to create billie eilish’s “bad guy” pic.twitter.com/FlubIPSD3i

— Seth Everman (@SethEverman) April 13, 2019

What are you all into right now? Let us know in the comments!

(image: Sarah Pflug from Burst)

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Trends can be tricky if they’re just not a fit for you. And let’s face it, not all the trends we see on the major runways are suitable for melanin […]

The post 3 Trends From This Week’s Resort Shows To Try Now appeared first on Essence.

Lora King is keeping the legacy of her father, the late Rodney King, alive almost three decades after he survived a notorious police beating that triggered L.A. Riots.

Back in 1991, four white LAPD officers were charged with tasering and viciously beating Rodney King with their batons and boots during a police stop. Despite video evidence of the attack, an all-white jury acquitted the cops, sparking public outrage, the onset of rioting, and a nationwide call to end police violence against the African American community.

Now, at 35 years old, Lora King launched a scholarship program to honor her father, who passed away in 2012, and uplift other black dads, according to The L.A. Times.  The goal of her “I am a King” scholarship is to encourage black fathers to play a more active role in their children’s lives by sponsoring special events for dads and their kids. The program will provide grants on a rolling basis that will fund a range of events, from a family dinner to a trip to Disneyland. In addition, in 2016 she launched the Rodney King Foundation to advance social justice and human rights causes.

Lora D. King, daughter of Rodney King (Facebook.com/dene.king)

King is part of a long list of black women who have used the tragedy of a loved one victimized by racialized violence as motivation to affect change. Some of the most notable women are the “Mothers of the Movement,” who joined forces to advocate for police, criminal justice, and gun reform following the deaths of their unarmed African American children by law enforcement or gun violence.

Here are six other black women who’ve turned their agony into activism by pushing for institutional and structural change, fighting for social justice, and raising awareness around the disproportionate rates of violence against black Americans.

Lucy McBath

U.S. Rep Lucy McBath (Wikimedia)

In 2012, Lucy McBath’s 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed by a white man at a Florida gas station over an argument about loud music. When the killer invoked Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law as a defense, McBath asserted herself onto the frontlines of the fight for gun control and justice. She retired from a 30-year career with Delta Airlines to become the national spokesperson for both Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Eventually, McBath’s son’s killer was sentenced to life in prison, but that did not stop her activism around gun reform. In 2018, she launched a successful campaign for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Now, as a U.S. representative, McBath has co-sponsored gun control legislation that would require universal background checks for those seeking to purchase armed weapons.

Sybrina Fulton

Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and father, Tracy Martin (Twitter.com/SybrinaFulton)

Since Sybrina Fulton’s son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by white vigilante George Zimmerman in Florida, Fulton has been working to expand voting rights in the state and has become one of the most visible members of the “Mothers of the Movement.” She also helped found the Trayvon Martin Foundation, an organization that seeks to find solutions for youth, help parents who have been victimized by senseless violence, provide scholarships to inner-city youth, and strengthen a positive self-image within the community.

Gwen Carr

Gwen Carr (Twitter.com/GwenCarrEric)

Gwen Carr said that the death of her son, Eric Garner, who died in 2014 after being placed in a police chokehold, was her political awakening. In an editorial published on NBC News’ Think column in October, Carr talked about how the tragedy has encouraged her to become more civically engaged.

Me, I don’t like to write. So instead, I go up to Albany, and I get in the faces of our politicians. I try to emphasize what I want from our government, and what I need elected officials to do. For instance, I went to Albany with a group of other New York mothers in 2015, and got Governor Cuomo to sign an executive order that allowed a special prosecutor from the state attorney general’s office to investigate all police killings of unarmed people for a year. (He’s since extended it.) And what this does is that, when these senseless killings take place, the cases are taken it out of the hands of the local district attorney and put in the hands of the state attorney general

Lesley McSpadden

Michael Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden on stage at the St. Louis Peace Fest the day before burying her son. (Photo: Brett Myers/Youth Radio via Flickr)

The shooting death of the unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 sparked nationwide protests and fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury chose not to indict the white officer who fatally shot Brown while his hands were in the air. Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, however, has taken up the cause, running for a seat in the 2019 Ferguson city council. Although she did not win that race, McSpadden revealed that she is open to running again in 2020.

“I did this because we were all devastated over what we saw almost five years ago,” McSpadden told CNN last month. “I was personally devastated because that’s my son. My children witnessed the devastation.” She added, “After watching Ferguson over these years, I’ve looked for progress and I haven’t seen anything. My candidacy is the first step of building towards justice for my son and building towards a part of his legacy to make sure that my son did not die in vain.”

Tiffany Crutcher

Tiffany Crutcher (Twitter.com/TiffanyCrutcher)

The death of Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed black man who was fatally shot by police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while his hands were in the air, shook the nation in 2016. The incident occurred when Crutcher’s SUV broke down in the middle of the road. But, instead of receiving car assistance, he was met by several police officers who drew their weapons and typecasted him as a “bad dude.” Video footage shows the officers walked closely behind Crutcher while his hands were up. He then stood beside his car moments before he was tasered and a white female officer opened fire and killed him, arguing that Crutcher failed to adhere to police commands and was reaching inside of the driver side window for a weapon. Crutcher’s attorneys, however, insist that his car window was rolled up.

Following his tragic death, his sister, Tiffany, quit her job as a healthcare provider and became a full-time political activist. In addition to working as a field organizer for Doug Jones’ senatorial campaign in Alabama, she has been involved in several judicial races in the state. “The death of my twin brother forced me to get involved [in politics],” she said, according to The Root. She also launched a national Campaign Against Bad Cops, which seeks to abolish the immunity that protects government officials from being sued for discriminatory actions performed within their official capacity. Furthermore, she and her family are fighting to lower the legal standard an officer has to meet so that they can be more easily indicted for biased killings.

Geneva Reed-Veal

Geneva Reed-Veal (Facebook.com/geneva.reedveal.3)

Geneva Reed-Veal loss her daughter, Sandra Bland, in 2015 in an unexplained hanging death inside of a Texas jail cell, following an unlawful traffic stop. Since then, Reed-Veal has used her voice to speak out against police brutality and state-sponsored abuse by law enforcement. She, along with the eight other “Mothers of the Movement,” also delivered a powerful speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention where she endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

The post From Sorrow to Strategy: 7 Black Women Who’ve Turned Their Agony Into Activism appeared first on Black Enterprise.

Writer: Matthew Rosenberg / Artist: Carlos Gomez / Marvel

“Rahne Sinclair didn’t have a place in this world.”

The tragedy of mutant existence comes with constant violence. The X-Men choose to fight this struggle head on, but life on the front lines takes its tolls.  At the end of the day, everyone wants to to be accepted – to be normal. In the previous issue, the desire for a normal life led Rahne Sinclair aka Wolfsbane to walk away from the X-Men.  By story’s end, however, Dani Moonstar collapsed in agony as she felt Wolfsbane die.

Wolverine mourns in his own way.  On the day of the funeral for Wolfsbane, Logan decides to skip the services in favor of some direct action.  While those who knew Rahne the best, memorialize her in a solemn ceremony: Wolverine takes another route. Once again using their prisoners like a backup team, Wolverine takes the ninja Kwannon on a quick mission to bring justice to Wolfsbane’s murderers. Using Kwannon’s psionic abilities, they track the assailants to a small house full of mid-twenties bro-bro’s. Wolverine forces Kwannon to use her powers to link his mind to theirs in order to see what happened to Wolfsbane. Seeing their ignorance and entitlement revealed in a park attack, Wolverine pulls out a bag of weapons and begs them to “Please, fight back.” Before he can get started, however, the O.N.E. raid the house in search of mutants and not mutant murderers. 

The issue boasts a strong script that splits the narrative along the parallel mourning of Wolverine with Kwannon and the other X-Men. Whereas the others choose to grieve together, Logan is the loner who works through his emotions with action. Most interestingly, however, is the subtle way in which Rosenberg shows the diminishing rift between the ideologies of Wolverine and Cyclops. Since bringing Logan aboard the team as an advisor, and then dissolving X-Men leadership into a committee, Scott’s post-resurrection persona veers closer to guerilla Scott rather than boy scout Slim.  In the opening scene, although he is dressed for Rahne’s funeral while Logan medicates with whiskey, Scott still pours himself a drink trying to convince Logan to attend the service. Ultimately, their emotions boil over into the inevitable fist fight that reveals the two are more alike these days than they would like to believe. Visually, fill-in artist Carlos Gomez holds a strong pencil next to series regular Salvador Larroca. His renderings veer more toward the stylistic leanings of early Chris Bachalo or Joe Madureira with bulkier renderings of the characters, especially Wolverine. The visuals here maintain the quality and energy of the preceding issues without the sudden jolt of a quality drop that can kill a series trajectory during a strong storyline.

Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men reboot reads like a tragic opera.  With their numbers diminishing by the day and death looming at every moment, the last X-Men are a constantly rotating crew of survivors in need of family.  The only thing that separates them from their enemies and extremists is their dedication to one another and the sacrifices they make together. So far, the “This is Forever” storyline stands as one of the more compelling mutant arcs of recent years. Scheduled to end just as the recently announced Jonathan Hickman mini-series Powers of X and Houses of X debuts in July , Uncanny X-Men may only be the beginning of a banner year for mutant-dom.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Purple Ninjas

Reading Uncanny X-Men? Find BNP’s other reviews of the series here.

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The post Uncanny X-Men#17 Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.