Poitier or Cosby? Foxy Brown or Lil’ Kim? Jay-Z or R. Kelly?

David Mills, a TV writer who used to write for newspapers, is regularly surprised — and irked — when newspapers and magazines misidentify black people in articles and photo captions. “I mean famous black people,” Mills writes on his Undercover Black Man blog. So he has begun a Misidentified Black Person of the Week feature, with the aim of creating a database on such errors. Here’s his first entry, and here’s the type of correction that papers end up running.