The Root

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...

Hollywood is riding the woke train—without making any necessary stops along the journey to do the real work.Read more...

Trump knew. Everyone in the White House knows he knew. But the company line is to protect the president, so everyone in the White House is lying. It’s kind of the White House’s thing.

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I’m honestly starting to think Facebook won’t crack down on racists because they’re the company’s target demographic. Seriously, how many stories have you read about a mayor/police officer/random white guy who works at the post office losing his job because of something racist posted on Facebook? Mark Chambers, a…Read more...

The deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd have turned the words “I can’t breathe” into an infamous phrase inextricably linked to the issue of excessive force used by police on Black citizens. Both Garner’s and Floyd’s altercations with police were recorded and posted on social media for the world to view, but one…Read more...

Princeton announced Saturday that it was striking the name of former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from its public and international affairs school as well as a residential building, citing his “racist thinking and policies” during his time in office, as well as his tenure as president of the famed Ivy League school.…Read more...

Social media companies have consistently been under fire over the past three years for allowing President Donald Trump and his supporters to use their platform to promote hate speech, even though hate speech supposedly violates their terms of service. Now, both Reddit and Twitch have begun to crack down on hateful…Read more...

When Kanye West’s clandestine 10-year deal with Gap for an ongoing Yeezy collaboration (which was reportedly years in the making) was announced last week, it seemed like a match made in overpriced basics heaven. The fact that Nigerian-British female designer Mowalola Ogunlesi is onboard as design director of the…Read more...

The last month has seen prolonged, mostly peaceful protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Naturally, the police response has been engaging in the very same brutality that people are protesting. Such was the case during a Sunday night protest in Detroit when a police officer drove an SUV through a crowd…Read more...

What do you call a Karen who’s so racist she can’t even argue with other white people without using anti-Black racial slurs? A white woman in Adrian, Mich., was filmed dropping the n-bomb several times while shouting at her new neighbors for being noisy.Read more...

No one knows John Winsmith or John McQueen.Read more...

After the deaths of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, we saw NBA players don hoodies and T-shirts in order to create awareness around the injustices that befall our communities. And in looking to take those efforts even further, CBS Sports reports that the NBA has given players the green light to replace their names on…Read more...

A year after trans Afro-Latina Layleen Xtravaganza Polanco died while imprisoned in solitary confinement at Rikers Island, New York City Bill de Blasio has vowed to end the practice “once and for all.”Read more...

OK, NASCAR. We get it.Read more...

Hundreds of protesters gathered in St. Louis to march towards Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home demanding her resignation after she read the names and street addresses of protesters who are calling on the city to defund the police department during a Facebook Live press briefing last Friday. It was a peaceful march but that…Read more...

I had to check when this song and video came out because I associate it so heavily with college. Except, this was a single from Baduizm, which was released in February of 1997 when I was a senior in high school. The video for “Other Side of The Game” came out in the summer of 1997 before I even got to college so it’s…Read more...

Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins told The Root in an Instagram Live interview what exactly she means when she and her fellow council members call for defunding the police.

This past weekend was intended to be a landmark one for Essence. The beloved Black legacy publication celebrated its 50th anniversary amid a pandemic, pivoting its 26th annual Essence Festival of Music and Culture to a virtual format spanning over not one, but two weekends, culminating in its traditional Fourth of…Read more...

President Donald Trump would like America to believe that U.S. intelligence learned that a bounty had been placed on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan and no one told him.

Over the last month, companies large and small have paused their advertising on Facebook in an effort to push the social media giant to do more to stop the spread of hate on its platforms. The #StopHateforProfit campaign has amassed a huge roster of Facebook clients, including multinational conglomerate Unilever,…Read more...

The United States Supreme Court reversed a restrictive Louisiana abortion law Monday that would force all but one abortion provider in the state to close its doors, and which would impact reproductive laws across the nation.Read more...

Much like Issa Rae, I’m rooting for everybody Black.Read more...

The man we’ve grown to know as the professional football player who took a knee in protest against police brutality is giving us a peek into the young boy whose experiences started it all.Read more...

For President Trump, Twitter serves several purposes. First, it is his bully pulpit (more bully than pulpit) in which he vaguely threatens and intimidates rivals. Second, it’s his unfiltered voice to his people, which basically serves as a virtual “yee-haw” to round up the good ole boys. Lastly, it’s his masturbatory…Read more...

Anthony Mackie’s Marvel character Falcon not only has quite the big responsibility ahead of him as the future Captain America, but Mackie the actor does, as well—specifically, speaking to the fight for diversity and inclusion.Read more...

The culture could not be canceled on Sunday night, as the 20th—and entirely virtual—BET Awards set a new standard for quarantine entertainment. As was to be expected from the pioneering Black entertainment network, the evening was Black Lives Matter-themed—and the stars did not disappoint.Read more...

I’m pretty sure BET was amongst those of us who wistfully declared, “2020 is going to be my year.”Read more...