The Root

The world has transformed into a more socially conscious place in recent months, and if any medium captures the moments our world lives through best, it’s music. Whether Sam Cooke was pouring out his life experiences during the Civil Rights Movement for “A Change Is Gonna Come” in 1964, or Childish Gambino was showing…Read more...

For the past 20 years, the cover of O, The Oprah Magazine has served as a glossy, aspirational testimonial to the powers of manifestation: reading lists and reviews, career hacks, advice dispelled by all manner of gurus and girlbosses. And always, there was Oprah herself: beaming, often stately, always joyous. Until…Read more...

There are tens of thousands of Americans—nurses and uncles; bus drivers and doctors; aunties and baristas; grad students and my friend—who were killed by COVID-19 because they just weren’t able to escape it. Perhaps their occupation was high-risk. Perhaps they were unable to effectively social distance. Perhaps they…Read more...

Imagine a world riddled with insecurity and a mysterious abyss that seems to go on forever, perhaps starring the creator-star of a hit TV show named Insecure and produced by the man who wrote and directed Get Out (and invented the Sunken Place)?

There are places on TV, in magazines, and on the internet where you can find peer-and-eater-reviewed methods for preparing, cooking, and staging great steaks. Where the people who make the steaks promise that, if you follow their directions, step-by-step, you will have a delicious steak too.Read more...

Just over 80 years ago, two Black doctors applied for membership to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and there were rejected repeatedly for six years. On Wednesday, the AAP issued an official apology to the two physicians for the racism that kept them out of the academy from 1939 to 1945, when they were…Read more...

An awards season day in the life of a Black creator or a Black person interested in entertainment/award ceremonies goes a little something like this:Read more...

Rep. Louie Gohmert, who can only be described as a Texas-sized asshole who has famously refused to wear a mask, has tested positive for the coronavirus.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had to answer for the NYPD again on Wednesday morning, after a viral video showed officers in an unmarked van, some of whom were in plainclothes, grabbing a young protester off a Manhattan street on Tuesday evening.Read more...

Whether through sheer creativity or by amplifying a moment or a movement, music videos used to mean something and make you feel something. I crave the days of yore when I’d rush home off of the school bus in order to watch MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) or BET’s 106 & Park. I was eager to see moments everyone would…Read more...

In the NBA, secrets don’t exist. The streets talk.Read more...

When Attorney General Evil Fred Flintstone, aka Bill Barr, agreed to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee, he knew he was going to face some fire. Evil John Goodman has been Trump’s body man since being appointed America’s top cop. He’s made no bones about pushing Trump’s agenda, including freeing Trump’s…Read more...

Is anyone else beginning to feel like cops are really just a bunch of babies? It’s as if they spent generations in the top five of white suburban kids’ “What I want to be when I grow up” lists and, for 32 seasons, had the show Cops calling them “bad boys” and making policing look sexy. Then, the big, bad Black Lives…Read more...

All eyes are on the WNBA.Read more...

Hollywood is beginning to take accountability and action in terms of diversifying their casts for television shows and films. Amid calls for change, last month white voice actors Jenny Slate (Big Mouth) and Kristen Bell (Central Park) announced they’d be stepping down from their roles as characters of color in order…Read more...

The Root Institute, a virtual convening around the future of Black America in 2020 and beyond, features some pretty heavy hitters—from Stacey Abrams to Ava DuVernay to Lee Daniels—examining politics, art and activism, but what about the health of our minds and wallets?

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The Hollywood reckoning is happening all over town and this time, we’re visiting Riverdale—the series airing on The CW, that is.Read more...

In this day and age, everybody has a podcast.Read more...

In May, as protests over the death of George Floyd initially got underway in Minneapolis, a video went viral showing a man dressed in all black and carrying an umbrella, smashing windows at a AutoZone with a sledgehammer. After months of investigation, Minneapolis police now believe the man may be a white supremacist.Read more...

Health officials in Florida say that a 9-year-old girl is the youngest person in the state to die from COVID-19.

Man, white people aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. Which, I suppose, is a good thing, right? We should want the racists to expose themselves. Still, there’s something surreal seeing white people shamelessly indulging their racist beliefs. Take for instance Alabama state Rep. Will Dismukes (R-Prattville), who…Read more...

Here I was thinking that I’d have to spend the rest of my days ducking from disproportionate jail sentences, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and the KKK, but it would appear that after hundreds of years of torment and generational trauma, the NFL might’ve finally found the cure for racism.Read more...

By now, you’ve likely seen them, heard about them, and maybe even participated in the conversation about two of August’s most striking—and controversial—magazine covers: Simone Biles photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vogue and Viola Davis atop Vanity Fair, photographed by Dario Calmese—remarkably the…Read more...

A family in Florida is outraged after receiving a racist letter last Thursday that targeted their two teenage daughters.

Jagged Edge, easily one of the greatest R&B groups of all time—baby, baby baby, it’s actual and it’s factual—is releasing a new album, A Jagged Love Story, soon. Each member of the group has posted both the album’s cover art and track-listing on their respective IG feeds, noting that the album has been submitted to…Read more...

A Zimbabwe-born medical student living in London is filling in an important blind spot in the medical community: informing healthcare providers and patients how symptoms for a broad range of conditions appear on darker skin.Read more...

“[M]y skincare journey has been quite complex...some parts of my face are oily, some are dry, fatigue from travel, plus I have super sensitive skin, and chile now being in my 30s?!!”Read more...

The Austin Police Department has released bodycam footage and the 911 call from a fatal encounter between its officers and Michael Ramos, an unarmed 42-year-old man, in April of this year.

Although we’re pretty much free to use whichever language we wish within the body of a piece here, headlines are different. Most profanity is fine, in the proper context. But proper context or not, the granddaddy (“fuck”) needs approval from our editor-in-chief. Sexually explicit terms are a no-go, and slurs are, too.…Read more...

Inviting Dr. Anthony Fauci to throw out the first pitch to start the Major League Baseball season was a totally “fuck you” to the president.

For more than a century, no other institution in St. Louis spoke to the criminalization of the poor and marginalized like the “Workhouse,” a jail notorious for housing people unable to pay their bail in deplorable conditions.Read more...

HBO’s Watchmen, which revives the story of the 1921 Tulsa race riots within its adaptation of the DC comic of the same name, was the most recognized show when nominations for the 72nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced Tuesday. The superhero drama is nominated for a staggering 26 awards, including Best…Read more...

Contrary to popular belief, the national anthem and professional sports haven’t always held hands and sucked face in public.Read more...

A few weeks back, chart-topping emcee Megan Thee Stallion revealed via Instagram that she was shot in the foot on July 12 “as a result of a crime committed against [her] and done with the intention to physically harm [her],” despite early reports that she stepped on glass during a night out in the Hollywood Hills.…Read more...

When Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by then-New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo on July 17, 2014, his daughter Erica Garner immediately became an activist of the highest caliber. She organized marches, wrote articles, and stood up to demand a conversation with President Obama at the presidential…Read more...

Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot.

Oprah is returning to a role we are very familiar seeing her in, with a new talk show series premiering this Thursday, July 30 on Apple TV+ called The Oprah Conversation.

“I gave up my entire life for this family. I was willing to do whatever it takes. But here we are. It’s very sad.”

As of today, Drake has surpassed Madonna for the record for the most Billboard Top 10 singles in the chart’s 62-year history. This means he has just as many Billboard Top 10 singles as he has bad tattoos.Read more...

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but America has a bit of a coronavirus problem. And if you thought that Major League Baseball or the NFL would provide us with a much-needed escape from the perils of this pandemic, I regret to inform you that COVID-19 isn’t letting sports be great, either.Read more...

We may still be speculating about who presidential candidate Joe Biden will ultimately pick for his running mate, but Mattel’s latest release already has our vote. On Tuesday, the beloved toy brand announced its Campaign Team Set, created “to expose girls to public leadership roles and pique their interest in shaping…Read more...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has acceded to the presence of federal police in her city—the same federal officers who have been tear-gassing and beating men, mothers, and Navy veterans in Portland, Ore.—as part of President Trump’s ridiculously and ominously termed “Operation Legend.”

On her Emmy-winning daytime talk show, Ellen DeGeneres often (if not always) ends an episode with the sign-off “be kind to one another.” However, it’s been a not-so-secret secret that the set of her long-running show is a toxic, unfriendly environment to work in.Read more...

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There’s something about Facebook that just makes white people go, “I’m gonna end my whole career today.” In one of the most inventive instances of playing oneself, a Florida man was arrested after posting, among other things, a racist Cards Against Humanity play.Read more...

In an emotional Instagram Live on Monday, Megan Thee Stallion spoke at length about the July 12th shooting that landed her in the hospital, calling the incident “the worst experience of my life.”

When it comes to saving America, there is only one group that is even remotely qualified to field the call: Black women. Not only are they the backbone of the Democratic party, but they are a voting bloc that cannot be easily swayed or influenced by bullshit.

Last week, two things happened. On Thursday, Xbox gave its full-throated pitch for the Xbox Series X. On Saturday, I turned 28. As I move ever closer towards my impending doom and recent events make me grapple with my own mortality on a daily basis, I keep coming back to this one thought:Read more...