'Essence' Names White Fashion Director // Mark Anthony Neal on NPR

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From NPR's Talk of the Nation

For the first time in its 40-year history, Essence magazine will have a white fashion director. The change, at a magazine focused on the lives of black women, outraged many African Americans. Among them is professor Mark Anthony Neal. In his blog, New Black Man, he described feeling a sense of loss for the magazine he came of age reading. "Beyond this sense of loss," he wrote, "what really is at stake when a 'black' magazine, no longer black owned, but still critically representative to our communities' sense of themselves, simply becomes another periodical?" Mark Anthony Neal talks about the changes at Essence magazine and the future of black publications.

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