Chanté Griffin

I was mesmerized the first time I saw Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head on television. So mesmerized that I remember neither what she was wearing nor the red carpet event she graced that day. I just remember thinking, Wow, she has a new look, and she looks GORGEOUS! Like regal, Queen-to-be gorgeous! Beaming on that carpet at just five feet, she stood tall in confidence. On Sunday, when she walked the red carpet at the 94th Academy Awards, I was in awe again.

I’ll admit it — it’s easy for me to take Black History Month for granted. I’ve celebrated it for as long as I can remember; its presence is as constant and steady as choir rocks and handclaps in a Sunday morning service.
Tracing its roots reminds me that Black History Month is a fairly recent celebration, (considering the span of U.S. history), and that it’s just as critical today as it was when it was first established decades ago.

It was a civil showdown over animal testing for cosmetics, but animal rights activist Judie Mancuso remembers the firepower bristling in the room. She and three other activists facing 20 deep-pocketed cosmetics industry lobbyists crowded into a state legislator’s office in Sacramento.
“We had like every large corporation in the world against us,” says Ms. Mancuso, founder and president of the California-based animal rights group Social Compassion in Legislation (SCIL).

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.

The annual Kwanzaa traditions that Dele Lowman celebrated with her mom, brothers and surrounding community in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, were the highlight of her childhood. “One of the things my family would do is write out African Proverbs in calligraphy on nice paper, that my mom would have me decorate them,” she says. “We would roll them up like scrolls and tie them with ribbon and everybody would pick one.”

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.

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.

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?”

eagerly jumped on the affirmation bandwagon several years ago, excited to see my life change as I embraced the power of the spoken word. And it worked! I saw my actions shift as I declared things over myself. In fact, one of my first affirmations, I persist until I succeed, launched my freelance writing career. But a few months ago, as I proclaimed my affirmations during my morning mindset session, I experienced something new: the goals blossomed inside of me; I became certain they were true....

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