Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wokest of them all? We kid, we kid—no one wants to play the Woke Olympics. But just like us, Essence has some ideas about who the most influential, inspiring folks of 2019 are—femme folks, in this instance—with its third annual Woke 100 List.Read more...

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You’ve probably heard “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on the radio while driving along the winter roads—or maybe you remember the song from the cute Dwayne-and-Whitley scene in A Different World. Regardless of where you first heard the song, you may have, at one point, questioned the creepy lyrics.

Like many black folks, I grew up in a deeply religious household. That meant prayers before every meal, three church services a week on Sundays and Wednesdays, and pretending like a lot of gospel rappers weren’t fucking terrible.Read more...

Prince Rogers Nelson, a man of unmatched mystery, planned to give us a sneak peek into his surreal life.Read more...

This past weekend in the capital of African America—Atlanta—a gathering of Black Excellence took place on hallowed grounds in the city’s West End neighborhood. SpelHouse, the famed and noble portmanteau of two of Black America’s most illustrious and storied institutions—Morehouse College and Spelman College—celebrated…Read more...

Yeah, yeah...we know there’s no such thing as Halloween wishes (or the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown), but if we could cash in all the fun-sized candy for one wish this spooky holiday, it’d be to age as effortlessly as Missy Elliott seems to be doing (or Gabrielle Union, but we digress).Read more...

Dear Mr. Perry,

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T.I. on Monday continued his regrets tour when it comes to former protégé Iggy Azalea, saying that the Australian-born rapper fell off, in part, after she decided to switch things up once she realized “she didn’t really need black people” anymore.

As he has a tendency to do—especially when it comes to black or brown strongholds, from San Juan to Baltimore—Donald Trump trashed Chicago and its police superintendent during a speech Monday before a group of top cops.Read more...

House Democrats want to make one thing very clear to Donald Trump: The impeachment inquiry into his tenure in the Oval Office is the real deal.

Five Alabama police officers are on leave and one man is dead after the deceased man’s family reportedly witnessed cops shoot him at a local gym.Read more...

The yummy, sweet brown center of the transformative, celebratory and “let’s get free”-filled reproductive justice gathering known as SisterSong’s Let’s Talk About Sex Conference in Atlanta this weekend was former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (who was clearly robbed of that honor, let’s be clear).

California knows how to party—and when your birthday falls two days before Halloween, it’s bound to be a costume party. In celebration of her family’s recent relocation of their primary residence to Los Angeles, Gabrielle Union jumped in the way-back machine to bring us back to a happier time and place,…Read more...

While Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special didn’t exactly endear him to some segments of his not-so-adoring public, one thing we can all agree upon is that the 46-year-old comedian is a master of his craft and is in a class of his own. And if that wasn’t already painfully obvious, it became even more so on Sunday…Read more...

Innocent until proven guilty is one of the foundational tenets of American jurisprudence. Even when a person is arrested and jailed for a crime, they are afforded the same presumption of innocence as Ivanka Trump, Jesus Christ, the white people in lotion commercials or any other unblemished, blue-eyed blonde American.Read more...

It was a gamble for good at Chicago’s historic Palmer House, a Hilton Hotel on Saturday night, where local luminaries, socialites, breast cancer survivors and advocates gathered in support of Susan G. Komen Chicago at its annual Breast Cancer Action Month Gala, themed “All Bets on Pink.” Harkening back to the Roaring…Read more...

You don’t get to Eddie Murphy’s station in life—revered stand-up comic, Hollywood leading man, and occasional crooner—without having a firm understanding of your priorities. But even Murphy has his share of regrets and what if’s, including missing out on recording the star-studded charity single, “We Are the World.”Read more...

We have received a great deal of feedback from you, our readers, about the sound-on autoplay videos that have been inundating our sites. We want you to know that we hear you, that we take those complaints seriously, and that we, the writers, editors and video producers of The Root, are as upset with the current state…Read more...

On Oct. 12, police killed Atatiana Jefferson in her own Fort Worth, Texas, home.Read more...

On the “Things I Happen To Hate” spectrum—which, unfortunately, seems to be lengthening as I age—Halloween is nowhere near the pinnacle. In fact, it is a basement/replacement-level hate, down there with beets and “black Republican male haircuts”—acceptably hateable things that aren’t worth the bandwidth necessary for…Read more...

Senate Majority Leader and Zombie Voldemort, Mitch McConnell, went viral this weekend after a close friend of legendary Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings refused to shake the hand of He Who Should Not Be Named.Read more...

After conquering the Billboard charts with Bad Boy Entertainment, the beverage industry with Ciroc, fashion with Sean John, and both film and television with Revolt Films and Revolt TV, the man who once warned us he “can’t stop, won’t stop” has introduced his latest contribution to the culture: the Revolt Summit.Read more...

No, we don’t mean a reprisal of their genius Jackson 5 family costume (above). This year, the fictional family we know and love as the Johnsons are taking an eerily familiar approach to the group costume, revisiting perhaps the most terrifying film of the year—and one of the blackest.Read more...

Monday started off with a gut-punch if you’re a Chick-fil-a-vangelist, or a Popeyes worker on a perennially short-staffed shift: The Sandwich has announced its triumphant return to the fast-food restaurant’s menu.Read more...

She’s one of the most influential figures in American letters, and a hero of the Harlem Renaissance. Now, Zora Neale Hurston fans have a new slate of stories to dig into from the renowned scholar and writer.Read more...

Outside of campaign rallies filled to the brim with his fanatic worshippers or colleges packed with indoctrinated MAGAts, Donald Trump doesn’t really do public appearances.Read more...

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John Conyers—the longest-serving black congressman in U.S. history—has passed away.Read more...

Tyler Perry is playing for keeps.Read more...

Bernie Sanders has all the answers.Read more...

An Astorflex Boot Sale, a Home Depot Smart Home Sale, and Cold & Cough Gold Box lead off Sunday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Rise and Shine!Read more...

Old school Saturday Night Live fans rejoice!Read more...

I’m all for works of art being subjective but this so-called artist maybe should’ve re-thunk this particular creation.Read more...

A pair of goggle-wearing kids from the South Side of Chicago may seem an unlikely set of superheroes, but artist Hebru Brantley’s “Fly Boy” and “Lil Mama” are exactly that. Chicagoans have become increasingly familiar with the comic-like duo in recent years as they’ve had a recurrent presence in Brantley’s art, which…Read more...

Kamala Harris may be alright after all.Read more...

During last week’s long run, I cried.

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Amid criticism that Donald Trump has been wrongly profiting from his swank Washington, D.C., hotel, the Trump Organization now is reportedly thinking of selling the lease it holds on it.Read more...

Donald Trump kicked off a three-day criminal-justice forum at South Carolina’s Benedict College on Friday, giving a racially fraught speech before an audience predominated by Trump friendlies and including few students from the HBCU.

Maybe Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani needs to learn how to lock his phone.

I feel sorry for white people.Read more...

“She’s a Sagittarius,” jokes Rachel James when speaking about Pear Nova, the award-winning, cruelty-free, cult-favorite nail polish brand she created in 2012. The Chicago-based CEO, creative director, mom and Black Ink Chicago alum refers to her nearly 7-year-old brand as her baby—that is, of course, after her two…Read more...

A slim majority of white Americans agree that hundreds of years of chattel slavery continue to impact African Americans to this day; however, only 15 percent of them support reparations to redress this damage, according to a recent poll.

Ha! Got you, didn’t I? You clicked on this—hastily, lustily, thirsty as a motherfucker—to read a review of Kanye West’s Jesus Is King. But there will be no review here today, or tomorrow, or whichever day comes after tomorrow cause I’m really very sleep-deprived right now and I’m not quite sure what day it is.Read more...

This week in the Power Rankings are just messy. We’re talking Real Housewives of Atlanta-TMZ-Get her, Jade-level of messy. As we round into the final pre-holiday weeks of the campaign preseason, the gap between the political haves and have nots gets bigger and the knives come out. Campaigns and their surrogates have…Read more...

A federal court has ordered the Trump administration’s Wicked Witch of the West Wing, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, to pay $100,000 for violating a court order demanding that the department she oversees stop collecting loan payments from students who were bamboozled by a now-defunct educational institution.Read more...