Chante Griffin

It’s a buffet for the senses: dope music, grooving marching bands, flashing lights, and catsuit-clad hair models; hairstylists cutting neon strands in the dark and styling models’ hair upside down, underwater. The show-stopping pageantry and unparalleled floss of Black hair shows, including the Bronner Brothers International Beauty Show—the pinnacle of them all—are undeniable.

In 2019, when Tekulve Jackson-Vann told his supervisor at the Payson Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about his decision to wear his hair in locs, he was fired. “We’re asked to have our hair in a conservative style so it’s not a distraction to the patrons,” Jackson-Vann told a local network news reporter. “My first thought immediately was, ‘This is a moment — this is a moment where I can help educate my brethren in the Gospel that there are standards which are not roo...

Two veteran vegan restaurateurs in conversation on the tough but necessary work of feeding people with good food.

When agitators tried to loot the Nike store and surrounding shops on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles last year, Juan Ramirez and his fellow lowriders stood guard.
The Los Angeles Lowrider Community (LALC) wasn’t about to let the shop owners along the famous boulevard where they cruise bear the rage of people taking advantage of the unrest following George Floyd’s death. “We weren’t having that [looting],” says Mr. Ramirez.

Los Angeles County’s Measure J is a dope idea, and everybody should study it
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the unexpected can happen in a flash. Your life can be taken by a callous police officer on a summer day; protests can erupt in response to a state killing captured on video; the world you live in can suddenly flip due to mandatory shelter-in-place orders that isolate you from those you love the most. But 2020 also taught us that race-related innovation is possible.

The holiday is a collective that is bigger than any one of us. Let’s continue the tradition.

When Letha Muhammad’s son was in the third grade, he described to her a pattern that his 8-year-old mind couldn’t comprehend. “Mama, I noticed that [my Black classmates] always seem to get into trouble for playing with each other instead of doing their work, but when [my white classmates] do the same thing, they don’t,” he observed. “It’s not fair. Why does that happen?”

In 2010, Chastity Jones eagerly accepted a job offer from Catastrophe Management Solutions as a customer service representative. The offer, however, came with one caveat—she had to cut off her locs. Jones refused, and the company rescinded its job offer.

Prone to asthma attacks, Christian Wimberly wisely brought his inhaler to campus with a doctor’s note to verify he needed it. But when searched by school police at his high school, he was told he couldn’t have the inhaler because “it’s technically a drug" and to keep it in the nurse’s office. “But the nurse ...

When Black Lives Matter activists asked artist Nikkolas Smith to paint a portrait of George Floyd that would go on a billboard in New York’s Times Square, Smith outfitted Floyd in a black tuxedo and bowtie. The goal, said Smith, was to give Floyd the honor and dignity that he was denied when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on May 25, killing him.

Most women have a dramatic story about why they chopped off their hair: it broke off after a bad hair dyeing experience; a romantic break up warranted a change; or a milestone birthday or event prompted a rebirth. My decision to cut my hair was anti-climatic. No break-up, no drama, no one star Yelp review for the hair stylist who did me dirty.
One evening while sitting on my bed, I simply decided to go natural. That was a little more than three years ago, and my hair hasn’t felt the scorching...

Ora Washington did more on two courts than most ever do on one.

On January 6, 2019, the rapper Kanye West did what no superstar rapper before him has—he launched his own Sunday Service with a dynamic eighty-person gospel choir. West was the draw, but the gospel choir was the intended centerpiece. It is the highlight of his subsequent Jesus Is King and Jesus Is Born albums. While West’s highly acclaimed 2004 single “Jesus Walks” utilized a choir and rapped the protective power of Jesus, the Sunday Service made the choir the star, highlighting its unique ab...

As a 3-year-old, before I could even spell, I scribbled furiously in the notebooks I kept clutched at my side. My mom says it was a sign that I was going to become a writer. In honor of National Author’s Day (Nov. 1), I interviewed several California authors to discover what similar traits, if any, they displayed as children. Here are six signs that your child is a budding author: