The Root

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Apparently, somewhere along the line, hitting protesters with a car just became the default move of authority figures. While we’ve seen multiple police officers employ this horrific tactic over the last month, a driver for the Governor of Iowa has become the latest to use it as well.Read more...

The judge presiding over the trial of the four Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd has threatened to have the case tried outside of the city if the lawyers involved continue to make “inappropriate” public statements.

Justice League star Ray Fisher seems to be calling for some justice of his own.Read more...

At this point, it’s pretty clear that cops are by and large, pretty trash. Eight cops in Louisiana have only reinforced that assertion after allegedly beating two men over a seatbelt violation.Read more...

It wouldn’t be a week in America without a Florida man doing Florida man things. This week’s Florida man is Joseph Max Fucheck who, after seeing a Black man checking his mail, decided to pull a gun on him and go on a racist rant.Read more...

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the Denver Division of the FBI released a joint statement Tuesday confirming that they have been reviewing the facts in the case of Elijah McClain, the 23-year-old Black man who died last August after an…Read more...

The Root partnered with HBO Max for a very special conversation about On The Record, HBO Max’s documentary, which chronicles numerous sexual assault allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and explores the ways Black women’s voices are silenced in the music industry and beyond.Read more...

If you’ve ever wondered why Donald Trump’s skin looks like a piece of Goldfish cracker-flavored beef jerky, it might be because he’s been sleeping on sperm-flavored pillowcases moistened with an assortment of random booty juices.Read more...

There are a lot of misconceptions about what defunding the police means, which, at its simplest definition, is a reallocation of resources. Everyday citizens assess their budgets on a regular basis to determine if they are wasting money and could spend their precious dollars more efficiently. As police officers…Read more...

Have you ever heard the story of how Florida was created?

Mark McCloskey, one half of the husband-and-wife pair recently captured on video looking ridiculous while brandishing weapons at demonstrators passing by their St. Louis home, is now complaining that his “life has been ruined.”

On Feb. 8 in Valdosta, Ga., white police officers walked up behind a Black man who was already being questioned by another police officer, who was also Black. One of the white officers, without even announcing his presence, grabbed the Black man from behind, commanded him to put his hands behind his back then, within…Read more...

President Donald Trump, the man voted most likely to rub soft carrots all over his flaccid body, has weaponized Twitter once again by threatening to veto a national defense bill if an amendment from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (It should’ve been you and not Joe Biden!) demanding that military bases honoring the losers that…Read more...

A white woman was forced to call all the managers—the police, corporate headquarters and the actual manager of a Long Island, N.Y., department store—after she was brutally assaulted by a Target employee’s Black Lives Matter mask.Read more...

I have two children under the age of 3, which basically means I’m tired of clapping.

Putting Black faces in high places will not be the solution to structural racism in the United States. And while drug-fueled gun violence in the oft-maligned city of Chicago is an objectively horrifying problem, violating the constitutional rights of young Black men isn’t the way to address it, either.

Maybe it really is time we stop giving white people who seek to weaponize the police against Black people cutesy little nicknames like “BBQ Becky” or “Central Park Karen.” Perhaps it’s time for more fitting monikers like “Terrorist Tammy” or “Killer by Police Kathy.”Read more...

With Juneteenth hitting the national radar this year, I think it’s finally safe for us to give up all pretense of actually celebrating America’s independence (gained while we were still enslaved), and instead enjoy a long weekend full of socially distanced, dutifully masked fun! (Besides, we’ve already had our fill of…Read more...

On Tuesday, August Alsina published a video from his recent sit-down with Angela Yee for a very lengthy conversation surrounding his new album The Product III: stateofEMERGEncy, his documentary stateofEMERGEncy: The Rise of August Alsina, his life, love and more.Read more...

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In a world where you, an elderly white man, are in a presidential race in which you are trying to defeat the super boss evil overlord orange elderly white man with the (alleged) Adderall sniffs, how do you overcome his rabidly racist base while still trying to seemingly stay on the side of right?Read more...

It’s time to welcome a new class into the most elite membership in the film industry. On Tuesday, The Academy announced it is welcoming 819 new members.

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It’s taken a long time, but change is coming to Mississippi: Our state flag—with its archaic symbol of the confederacy—is finally coming down.Read more...

The pioneering and still most prominent media brand for Black women will once again have one at the helm—at least, for the immediate future. This is just one of the announcements Essence Communications made in a statement emailed to The Glow Up on Tuesday night, just two days after a now-viral open letter was…Read more...

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Mahershala Ali has been tapped to play Jack Johnson, the world’s first Black heavyweight champion, for an upcoming limited series on HBO.

I don’t know how many cops have to lose their jobs before they realize that maybe they shouldn’t be racist. Let alone be racist on Facebook. Apparently, four cops in San Jose, Calif. felt like learning that lesson the hard way.Read more...

A University of North Carolina Wilmington professor is retiring because of increasing calls for him to be fired over “vile” and inappropriate tweets that have been deemed bigoted because...well...that’s exactly what they are.Read more...

The level of headassery that’s endemic to Florida is truly astounding. Even in a situation designed to be a layup, they find a way to turn it into an airball. Take, for instance, a recently unveiled mural that whitewashed the faces of two black firefighters.Read more...

Now more than ever, we need and deserve as many platforms as possible that are spearheaded by Black voices.Read more...

Authorities in a rural Georgia school district are punishing a history instructor who seemingly dedicated all of his spare time to teaching students. The district banned the beloved educator from coaching after administrators charged the man with a heinous rule violation—the history teacher was teaching history.Read more...

The beauty of YouTube is that user-generated content drives its success. Anyone can post some videos, cultivate a following and make a decent living. The problem is anyone can post a video and for too long YouTube has allowed blatant white supremacy go unchecked on the platform. That may be changing, though, as…Read more...

It’s unfortunate that in the midst of celebrating its 50th anniversary, Essence has also been implicated in a rising controversy as past and current Black female staffers have anonymously launched a campaign to #TakeBackEssence. But as we also commemorate 50 years of Pride and the closing of Pride Month, we can…Read more...

Last weekend, dozens of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau’s family and friends gathered to lay the 19-year-old student and activist to rest. They crowned her coffin with pink carnations and wore face masks as they leaned into each other’s arms, sharing memories of their beloved, pausing to wipe away tears.Read more...

TV and film writer (and former contributor to The Root) Felicia Pride has an array of stories bubbling inside of her. Leading with a fascinating Hollywood journey that includes TV writing credits in Queen Sugar, a festival-accepted feature film and more exciting things to come, Pride embodies her surname.Read more...

The coronavirus changed me.Read more...

Wait...is this a rerun?Read more...

If you were still skeptical that much of America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic—namely, people posturing against a disease, taking up AR-15’s in defense of the right to get haircuts, and angrily dismissing commonsense advice to wear masks—has more than a tinge of racism embedded in it, this news may or may…Read more...

If pretty is as pretty does, perhaps we should expect exceptional behavior from the women who hold that rare title of “supermodel.” But in the wake of the protests that have swept the country and the resulting calls for accountability across industries, Joan Smalls asked her industry to think bigger than the…Read more...

Virgil Abloh keeps racking up Ls in 2020. First, his name became synonymous with “fifty” after he screenshot evidence of himself giving all of $50 to support protests against racial violence. Now, he’s ironically getting called out by troll king 50 Cent and the whole of Black Twitter for his lackluster design of…Read more...

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor Keith Burris, if you might recall, is America’s worst newspaper person, and the one responsible for the shit show at that paper this summer. On May 31, Alexis Johnson, a reporter who happens to be Black, tweeted an image of the Pittsburgh-infamous aftermath of the annual Kenny…Read more...

The shadow president known to the American public as Fox News is getting tired of Trump’s shit and has asked, practically begged, the president of people who fry snacks to wear a goddamn mask over his anus-shaped pie hole because he’d be modeling good practices and would stop being such a dick.

After a week of nail biting over the tight U.S. Senate race in Kentucky, Amy McGrath has now been declared the winner. Kentucky state Sen. Charles Booker was leading the race with nearly 79 percent reporting last week, but the final tally has McGrath with 45.1 percent of the vote and Booker with 42 percent.Read more...

Today is the last day of Black Music Month so I decided to go with one of the Blackest videos in recent memory—which unsurprisingly was the lead single from the one of the (if not the) Blackest moments of the 2010s, Marvel’s The Black Panther—Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “All The Stars.” In fact, the only thing Blacker…Read more...

Louisville Metro Council announced Monday that it will launch an investigation into how Mayor Greg Fischer handled the deadly police shooting of Breonna Taylor in March. The 26-year-old emergency medical technician was shot eight times in her home this spring in a botched drug raid conducted by Louisville Metro police…Read more...

If you happened to venture to Google this morning, no doubt you caught a glimpse of an American hero—one who is largely responsible for instigating the LGBTQ+ liberation movement as we know it today. Marsha P. Johnson was one of the leaders of the Stonewall uprising in 1969—50 years later on June 30, 2019, she was…Read more...

I stand before you ashamed. I never thought that I would have to apologize to you but I must. See, all this time I’ve been arguing that a racist third-grader has been widely tweeting from the president’s official Twitter account and I was wrong. Grossly wrong. Not only did it turn out that the president himself has…Read more...

Several Aurora, Colo., police officers have been put on administrative leave and are being investigated after showing up in disturbing photos at a memorial for Elijah McClain, who died after an altercation with police in 2019. The memorial was held near the site of McClain’s detainment by police officers, which led to…Read more...