She was a member of the 2018 class of The Root 100, and now, photographer Deana Lawson is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2020, the biennial award made possible by the luxury fashion label and administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation “to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art,” according…Read more...

Aisha Nyandoro has attended a wedding, her book club, gone to happy hour, and played spades—all on Zoom.Read more...

Despite the legal rollercoaster he’s experienced over the past year, it looks like Jussie Smollett won’t be counted out just yet.Read more...

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Nicole Russell discovered the power of paper tearing by serendipitous accident. A few years ago, when her younger sister was hurt and angry and needed a healthy way to vent, Russell told her to write down her feelings, empty out everything that was making her upset, and then rip up the page. The suggestion was a…Read more...

The countdown to Election Day is narrowing and each day counts—not just the day on November 3, but every single day leading up to it (shout-out to early voters).Read more...

A truck driver who drove through a group of protesters on a bridge in Minneapolis now faces two criminal charges.Read more...

Secret recordings published by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed that a white nationalist group plotted paramilitary training for its members.

A grieving family is demanding answers and justice after a 19-year-old Black man was fatally shot by a police officer in Waukegan, Ill.—a suburb of Chicago—during a traffic stop on Tuesday. The officer shot both the driver and passenger of the car involved in the stop. One shooting victim survived and is now in the…Read more...

Further proving you don’t have to be a politician to suppress the vote, the landlord of a Colorado trailer park threatened to increase rent for tenants should Joe Biden win the presidential election.Read more...

Antonio Brown is the David Ruffin of the NFL.Read more...

This is the second half of our two-part series predicting the likeliest scenarios for the 2020 election and its aftermath.Read more...

Even though tens of millions of American voters have already made up their minds about who ought to be the next president of the United States, many are still expected to tune into tonight’s final presidential debate between Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.

Remember when you got bad grades in school or forgot to do your chores for the 47th time? Then before your parents could take off their belt or banish you to your bedroom for an eternity, you’d attempt to negotiate a much less severe punishment in order to preserve your freedoms and civil liberties as a valued citizen…Read more...

If, like me, you are currently gazing out of the window listlessly, trying to soak up whatever gray, rainy daylight you can as it gets a minute shorter every day, never fear. Beyoncé is here, ready to put our love back on top with an Ivy Park palette that is subversively spring-like—just what we need, in these dark,…Read more...

Imagine a Grammy-based Guardians of the Galaxy elite force of equity and inclusion heroes, whose mission is to make sure Black voices are amplified...Read more...

Lovie Simone first watched the 1996 film The Craft when she was preparing for an audition.

Because the President didn’t like being called on his bullshit during an interview with 60 Minutes, he beat the news program to the punch and posted the full interview to his Facebook page Thursday before the news show could air it.

Tamar Braxton slammed WE TV, the network that broadcasts her family’s reality TV show Braxton Family Values, after it aired a teaser trailer featuring reactions to Tamar’s suicide attempt in July.Read more...

A Hennepin County judge has dismissed a third-degree murder charge against Derek Chauvin, one of four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the May 25 death of George Floyd.Read more...

Jason Whitlock is a black construction bag filled with vomit and precious white things placed inside the bed of a white man’s pickup truck next to a pair of king’s boots that he occasionally rubs for sustenance. If Jason Whitlock was stranded in the desert and God was willing to grant him one item of food he could eat…Read more...

You may not tune into anything on the streaming platform, but if you’re active on social media (or your work Slack), you’ve at least heard the name Quibi, specifically because everyone routinely talked about how they don’t know anyone who watches anything on the streaming platform, which launched earlier this year.Read more...

On Tuesday, dozens of voters in heavily Democratic Alachua County in Florida received an alarming email from what appeared to be an address belonging to the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys. The author of the email threatened to “come after” registered Democrats if they don’t vote for incumbent President…Read more...

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee moved one step closer to making America eat the goddamn cake on Thursday, as they advanced the nomination of Ruthless Records’ own Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, despite her being a heartless Neo fight-style dodger of questions.

Days after starting the second phase of a months-long search to find the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a forensic team uncovered at least 10 bodies found in an unmarked mass grave. The remains—10 wooden coffins buried in the same large pit—were found in a portion of Oaklawn Cemetery on Wednesday, close to…Read more...

If you’ve been keeping up with our ongoing coverage so far, you may know that The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been releasing regular panel sessions called Academy Dialogues as part of its equity and inclusion initiative Academy Aperture 2025.Read more...

In the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, America underwent a short-lived racial reckoning in which white people pretended to give a shit about the Black plight, and Black folks failed miserably to fully capitalize off of it.Read more...

Jasmyn Lawson has done a lot during these socially-distant times, including successfully announcing an incredible lineup of our favorite shows on Netflix that’ll keep us entertained well into winter.Read more...

I arrived home from external commitments just over a week ago to an extraordinary homecoming gift. It took the form of a movement—sometimes angry, sometimes entrancing, poignant, sometimes strident, certainly robust in expectations but always moving, visionary and organized. That movement demanded an end to…Read more...

In honor of the late Kobe Bryant, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture has displayed the jersey he wore during the 2008 NBA Finals.Read more...

A bonafide star since she first appeared on the hit ABC sitcom Black-ish at the age of 10, watching Marsai Martin come into her own as become its own joy.Read more...

On Monday, Compton Mayor Aja Brown announced the upcoming launch of a pilot program that will give regular, free payments to 800 of its lowest-income residents.Read more...

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. is really out here trying to trump Trump’s re-Trump-ulousness...Trump-diculousness...Read more...

In his first interview since barging into the home of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in March, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly of the Louisville Metro Police Department said he would certainly do things differently if he were able to redo that night.Read more...

On Tuesday, a Miami, Fla., police officer was photographed wearing a pro-Trump face mask while voting at the city’s Government Center. Most states restrict campaigning for any candidate within a certain distance from a polling place, and many states extend those restrictions to the wearing of any clothing, buttons or…Read more...

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Thursday nights have been always been the time for peak drama, thanks to Shonda Rhimes’ TGIT (Thank God It’s Thursday) primetime TV event featuring the likes of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. The characters in her stories typically go through some kind of dramatized conflict (or countless…Read more...

Because the Trump administration was created to show us exactly what the devil looks like, in 2018 they issued a “zero-tolerance” border-crossing policy that separated migrant children at the southern U.S. border from their parents and enslaved them in cages. Then it turned out that the administration had been…Read more...

On Tuesday, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar went on Twitch to stream the incredibly popular game, Among Us.

President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is continuing his lifelong reputation of being dried-up elephant hawk-spit after he was caught on film reaching into his pants and touching his genitals while lying on a bed with a woman he believed was a journalist but was actually an actor in Borat’s new movie, Borat…Read more...

In the lexicon of “boy-meets-girl” romances, there is one love rarely explored: our love of shoes (foot fetishes notwithstanding). We also love nothing more than a Black fashion moment, so the long-awaited release of the collaboration between two of our favorite labels—Brother Vellies and Pyer Moss—which walked the…Read more...

In July, the team formerly known as the Washington Racial Slurs bid adieu to their racist-ass name after 87 years.Read more...

So Inside Out is a Pixar movie about a kid named Riley and mostly about the intersecting and competing emotions inside of her that exist like a control center in her brain and how all emotions—even the ones like sadness that we’d rather not have—have a symbiotic relationship. It was released in 2015 but I watched it…Read more...

What would 2020 be without a bizarre introspective film about a big-ass purple dinosaur?!Read more...

When Mary J. Blige’s aunt died of breast cancer, the news was both shocking and devastating.

Imagine an America where you can call the authorities on a Karen for calling the authorities on you just for existing while Black. San Francisco, Calif., may very well be on its way to that reality—or at least one where Karens and their Ken counterparts will be held accountable for their racism.Read more...

Despite a 24-hour curfew imposed by the government, hundreds of young Nigerians gathered in Lagos Tuesday afternoon to continue protesting against police violence in the country. As they had been doing for weeks, they waved Nigerian flags, danced to Afrobeats and carried signs with the slogan “#EndSARSNow.”Read more...

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) has been battling South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) for who will get to bronze the president’s testicles and keep them in their suit jacket pocket, closest to their heart. While no one will beat Graham’s commitment and penchant for punishment, it looks like Gaetz didn’t walk away…Read more...

Jerry Jones doesn’t get it.Read more...

Valerie Jarrett was one of the most trusted advisers in President Obama’s administration, and in the years since, has lent her expertise as a board member of Ariel Investments, Lyft, the Kennedy Center, Time’s Up, and more, in addition to being Chair of the Board of When We All Vote, co-Chair of the United State of…Read more...