The Root

He may be a bop-producing provocateur, but Lil Nas X also believes pearl-clutching should be equal opportunity. Case in point: on Wednesday, the rapper, who earned both headlines and the ire of Nike earlier this year with the release of a limited-edition line of customized Air Max 97s containing a drop of human blood,…Read more...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to name State Sen. Brian Benjamin of Manhattan as her next lieutenant governor, according to various reports. He will be the second Black man to hold the job, making his new role an especially history-making one because Hochul is New York state’s first top female chief executive.Read more...

Wednesday, August 25, 2021, marked the 20th anniversary of Aaliyah’s death.

On Wednesday, R. Kelly’s defense team continued with cross examination of the second witness present in the long-awaited trial of the disgraced R&B singer.Read more...

What’s going on with white people?Read more...

Mass murderer, white supremacist and All-American scumbag Dylann Roof will have to meet his maker for killing nine Black people in a South Carolina church back in 2015, a court ruled Wednesday.Read more...

Another major magazine can now boast a Black editor-in-chief! On Wednesday, Condé Nast was announced that it had found its replacement for longtime Allure magazine EIC Michelle Lee, who announced earlier this summer that she’d be departing for Netflix. Fashionista reports that Lee’s replacement will be none other than…Read more...

The ranks of Black female tennis phenoms with fashion collections just swelled a little. On Wednesday, Coco Gauff joined fellow fashionable ladies of the court Serena and Venus Williams and Naomi Osaka as she introduced her first collection with her sponsor, New Balance.

Anyone who has experienced some form of racial oppression has experienced W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness.” From code-switching to sinking into the comfort of one’s family history, it’s a persistent concept that plagues and challenges one’s everyday existence.Read more...

In late February 2021, Virgil Abloh’s Off-White released a varsity jacket with a logo that looked similar to the iconic “WW XXL Athletic” design of pioneering streetwear brand Walker Wear—so much so that founder April Walker wrote an essay in March 2021 expressing her concern, contempt and complete shock at the new…Read more...

This offseason, point guard Dennis Schröder gave his NBA peers a master class on how not to properly assess your free agent value. After turning down a four-year, $84 million extension from the Lakers while in search of a bigger payday, he was forced to grovel and beg for a measly $5.9 million salary from the Boston…Read more...

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was sentenced on Monday to more than 5 months in prison for burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a pro-Trump demonstration last December.Read more...

A new poll shows that Black people are leading white Americans by 10 percentage points when asked if they have been vaccinated. The NBC News poll shows that 76 percent of Black folks said they have received a vaccine. Sixty-six percent of whites answered in the affirmative.Read more...

The House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on Tuesday, with a 219-212 vote. According to CBS News, the legislation passed along party lines and is headed to the Senate for a tough fight with GOP lawmakers led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.Read more...

Fresh off of collecting her 11th Olympic medal at the Tokyo Olympics and, in turn, becoming the most decorated American track and field athlete of all time, Allyson Felix made an appearance Monday night on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to discuss her experience in Tokyo as well as her new sneaker brand, Saysh. But instead of…Read more...

In a state Senate hearing on Tuesday, North Carolina lawmakers approved a bill that defines how racism, gender and sexism can be taught in schools and also bars teachers from promoting certain sociopolitical beliefs to their students.Read more...

Chlöe Bailey of the R&B duo ChloexHalle will be making her solo debut at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs).Read more...

Hi, y’all! It’s me, again—Dr. Kinitra, your resident horror scholar. Though I am bummed about the (temporary?) demise of Lovecraft Country (shortsighted reprobates!), we have so much Black horror in the Hollywood pipeline, I’ll be popping up from time to time.

I have never seen a boat shoe fight a Croc and yet here we are after a Twitter feud between Republicans’ favorite Black women not named Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens and Kimberly Klacik, has led to a $20 million lawsuit and not one edge being snatched.

Real Hot BTS Shit!Read more...

If you are a person of a certain age and musical tastes, you no doubt remember exactly where you were when you learned of the tragic death of entertainer Aaliyah on August 25, 2021. It was the kind of seismic cultural shift that forever impacted a generation already deeply influenced by the singer’s music, image and…Read more...

Star Georgia running back and mediocre NFL running back Herschel Walker (Don’t look at me like that. If he was so great then why isn’t he in the NFL Hall of Fame?) has filed to run for the U.S. Senate to represent Georgia with the support of his friend and savior, Donald Trump.Read more...

So far, Kanye West has slept in the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, reconstructed his childhood home in Chicago’s Soldier Field, pushed back the release date of Donda multiple times and, most recently, legally filed to change his name from Kanye Omari West to just “Ye.”Read more...

A few years ago, Yelitsa Jean-Charles, the 20-something founder of Healthy Roots Dolls, was pleasantly surprised to see Serena William’s daughter Olympia photographed with Zoe, the Healthy Roots signature doll. As she tells The Root, “I look at all of my orders and obviously I would have noticed the name,” she says…Read more...

In a past life, I used to watch ESPN’s First Take religiously.

Jonathan Pentland, a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army, was found guilty of third-degree assault and battery after pushing a Black man in a South Carolina neighborhood back in April.Read more...

This year’s U.S. Open will be without plenty of big names, as Roger Federer, Dominic Thiem, and Rafael Nadal will all be skipping out on the festivities at Flushing Meadows, where the national championship is set to begin on Monday. However, I regret to inform you that there’s another tennis legend who be competing at…Read more...

Health experts in Mississippi and the federal level are urging residents in the state not to ingest ivermectin to treat COVID-19. In case you wanna know what ivermectin is, it is a drug designed to treat illness in livestock—not humans.Read more...

When the pandemic hit, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had positioned himself as calm during the chaotic, misinformed storm. President Trump had become his foil and Cuomo’s daily press conferences weren’t just must-see TV, they were one of the places where Americans who didn’t vote for Trump could hear an elected…Read more...

Editor’s note: The following contains explicit descriptions of sexual and physical abuse and coercion.Read more...

Like most good things that happen in life, I re-happened upon Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” by accident—and it wasn’t by being Rickrolled, the prank-turned-phenomenon of sending somebody a video link that claims to be one thing—no Amerie...or Ameriie?—but is really a link to the video for Rick Astley’s…Read more...

A three-judge panel in North Carolina ruled 2-1 Monday that the state must restore voting rights for thousands of residents with felonies. Under the current law, residents are barred from voting until they have been fully discharged from probation, parole or suspended sentence.Read more...

“Dance came from the people and should always be delivered back to the people.” — Alvin Ailey

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is continuing his fall from ashy to trashy as he was caught on camera shaving while eating at an airport restaurant.

Good evening and welcome to yet another episode of Celebrities Say the Dumbest Things! I’m your host, One Tired Writer.

Previously at The Root, we reported that former NBA star J.R. Smith enrolled at North Carolina A&T with an expressed desire to not only pursue a degree in liberal studies, but to play on the school’s golf team. And now, courtesy of The Undefeated, comes the NCAA’s decision on his college eligibility:Read more...

Over the weekend, Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) held its annually televised fundraiser.Read more...

One of the most pioneering Black entertainers in history—and certainly one of its most famous expats—is receiving well-deserved recognition, 46 years after her death. On Tuesday, it was announced that the remains of American-born entertainer-activist Josephine Baker would be reinterred at Paris’s Pantheon monument,…Read more...

The former president of the people of Alabama is asking a Florida judge to issue a preliminary injunction in his beef with YouTube—which has banned his racist lying ass from the site—so he can have access to the platform to sell his wares.Read more...

Back in April, WWE superstars Bianca Belair and Sasha Banks made history (and broke the internet) when they became the first Black women to go head-to-head in a Wrestlemania title match. As the two performed in front of the WWE’s first live audience in over a year—a sold-out crowd of over 25,000 at Raymond James…Read more...

Mark Bartlett, who threatened a group of Black protesters with a loaded gun and yelled racial slurs at them on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2019, is pushing for a “Stand Your Ground” defense.

Fashion lovers who tuned into the history-making haute couture debut of Pyer Moss this July were in for a sight like nothing the fashion world had ever seen. While the brand was well known for its all-Black everything presentations, the first Black American-led label to present during the ultra exclusive Haute Couture…Read more...

A California high school is facing an investigation after white students were captured on a video that went viral over the weekend abusing a Black doll named “Shaniqua,” stomping it, positioning it in sexually suggestive positions and posing with it during a football game Friday.Read more...

Somehow we still don’t have a release date for Donda, but we do have yet another listening party. At this point, Kanye may not even need to drop the album as he’s played it for the public so many times. But yes, still talking about Donda and though it’s been a few weeks now since the Chicago rapper announced his 10th…Read more...

After previously expressing his reluctance to receive any coronavirus vaccines—a decision he deemed “too personal” to confirm or deny publicly—it should come as no surprise that unvaccinated quarterback Cam Newton’s attempts to adhere to the NFL’s COVID-19 health and safety protocols have gone awry.Read more...

Real Superhero Girl Shit!

In a move that may have national implications, one of South Carolina’s largest school districts asked the state’s highest court to determine whether state legislators have the constitutional right to prevent local school officials from protecting students from the COVID-19.

Dr. Funkenstein is in, y’all, and he’s pulled out his prescription pad to write us a ‘script for a daily dose of “Funk Aspirin.”

Anyone who ever had the opportunity to see Prince perform live—especially in his younger years—witnessed a dynamic and almost otherworldly talent at work as he commanded the stage with his voice, guitar and often acrobatic moves. For this writer, the first time was in 1984 at the Purple Rain tour stop in our shared…Read more...

Before I get into this, I’d just like to specify that the first part of this headline should be sung in the tune of Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack’s rendition of “Young, Gifted & Black.”