Erin Aubry Kaplan

Photo by AP/WorldwideBlack history month is nearly upon us, and it already feels like it weighs a ton. I've never entirely embraced the notion of relegating the observance to February - as every black comic has pointed out, it's the shortest month of the year - because it always feels......

Tony Wafford, director of the county-funded Palms Residential Care Facility for minorities living with HIV/AIDS, is not infected with the virus. He is heterosexual, with more than a touch of black-man machismo that works as part of his considerable charm and personal energy. He had a comfortable career as an......

Mervyn Dymally sounds crushed. This is not characteristic of the Compton-area assemblyman, a veteran of electoral politics and various racial causes known for his hardy optimism and upbeat demeanor that often borders on twinkly. But when talking about last week’s nearly uniform decision by the county board of supervisors to......

THE MOVEMENT HAD BEEN GROWING for months but reached critical mass in the last several weeks when campaign paraphernalia started appearing citywide: T-shirts, caps and bumper stickers that read "Save King/Drew." On Tuesday when that movement converged in full force upon a public hearing held at Martin Luther King/Charles Drew......

Illustration by Ron Dunn Fortune is a fickle mistress. A year and a half ago, 60-year-old Bernard Parks was a man with the wind at his back. He had just coasted to victory in the 8th City Council District with some 80 percent of the vote, capping a remarkable political......

Photo by Jack Gould When Jason Seward came to town in 1997 to pursue a graduate degree in public administration at USC, he didn’t plan on staying. Then a series of fortuitous political connections led to an internship in county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s office. After a year the Indiana......

Writers have all manner of daily inspirations — morning walks, journal-keeping, speaking into tape recorders. Mine is a single piece of yellowed newsprint taped to my computer monitor at work. It’s a comic strip, Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks,” that ran a couple of years ago in the Los Angeles Times......

If I needed any more proof that we’ve all been living in two Americas for the past 20 years or so, Serena Williams gave it to me a couple of years ago when she scandalized the U.S. Open by wearing a Lycra cat suit on the court. It was scoop-necked,......

Maxine Waters is mad. That’s not unusual for the congresswoman, whose public indignation over matters affecting her South-Central district is legion. But Waters is mad about something she had hoped to largely sit out — the crisis at Martin Luther King Jr.–Drew Medical Center in Watts/Willowbrook that has been fulminating......