Stay in the know with our roundup of this week’s top stories (1/18/14-1/24/14).

Op-ed: Color Blind on SNL

As exciting as the addition of [Sasheer] Zamata is, she is now under a pressure no other cast member is to “achieve” since she has been made the quintessential minority hire–hired specifically because she is black. It’s a burden that should not be on her, but on the producers, but should she not be stellar, the criticism will be succinct: [Kenan] Thompson was right, SNL was right: black women aren’t ready.

More on SheWired.

Here’s What Transgender Progress Looks Like

Attention, Katie Couric: Here’s how you treat transgender women in the media.

About two weeks after an interview aired in which “Orange is the New Black” actress Laverne Cox gracefully brushed aside Couric’s invasive, genitalia-focused questions, Cox attended Elle magazine’s Women in Television celebration.

You’ll notice the Getty Images caption in the photo above doesn’t identify her as a “transgender actress.”

As fashion bloggers Tom and Lorenzo point out, it’s impressive enough “we’ve reached the point in our culture when a mainstream celebrity and fashion site like ours can feature a celebrity transgender woman on the red carpet.”

Read more over at The Baltimore Sun.

We Need To Talk About Colonialism Before We Criticize International Anti-LGBTQ Legislation

It is important to defend human rights and to speak out against human rights violations around the world. However, the West, in its attempts to endorse freedom across the globe, has invoked — once again — the White Savior trope that ignores and erases any Western culpability in anti-LGBTQ policies that occur in other parts of the world, especially in the Afro-Diaspora. To talk about anti-gay legislation internationally, we need to talk about a history of white supremacy that brought homophobia and anti-LGBTQ legislation to various countries.

More on Autostraddle.

[University of Texas] Professor Brings Black Queer Film to Campus Community

The omnipresence of the Internet and search engines such as Google has not made professor Matt Richardson’s search for black queer films, literature and music any easier.
Richardson, associate English and African and African diaspora studies professor, discussed his goal to continue identifying and archiving films for the UT Libraries Black Queer Studies Collection during a talk Wednesday. Richardson said this mission can be difficult because typing the words “black” and “queer” into a search bar will not necessarily bring up this type of cultural material sufficiently.

Antonio Santana, an African and African diaspora studies graduate student, said he has been following Richardson’s whole process of digitizing black queer art and cultural content for UT, which, according to Richardson, now has one of the largest collections of black queer film in the country.

Continue reading here.