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Louisiana Judge Who Shot Off N-Word Laced Text Messages After Her Affair Was Uncovered Resigns
One day after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called for her resignation, District Judge Jessie LeBlanc submitted a letter announcing she’d be stepping down immediately. LeBlanc had been facing mounting pressure to resign after a local news station discovered that not only had she been having an affair with a chief deputy in her Parish,…
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America's Top Business School Names First Black Woman as Dean
For the first time in its 139-year history, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the top-ranked business school in the country, will have a black woman serve as its dean. Erika James, who has led Emory’s Goizueta School of Business since 2016, was named the school’s next dean, making her the first woman…
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In 2020, Who Is Helping Black Women Start Their Own Businesses?
For more than a decade, black women have been starting businesses at a rate that eclipses many of their peers, even as entrepreneurship as a whole in the U.S. is in decline. But despite all the work they’re putting in, black women still face greater hurdles in accessing capital to fund their businesses than other…
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Dozens of South African Women With HIV Were Forcibly Sterilized, Report Finds
A new report published this week from South Africa’s Commission for Gender Equality found state hospitals forcefully sterilized dozens of HIV-positive South African women. In many instances, investigators found hospitals threatened not to assist the women in giving birth unless they signed the sterilization consent forms. According to ABC News, the commission’s 57-page report looked…
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Florida Officer Who Detained a 6-Year-Old for Throwing a Tantrum Caught on Bodycam Bragging About Arrest: 'Now She's Broken the Record'
The story told by police body cameras is even worse than the one initially reported last year, when school resource Officer Dennis Turner was fired for arresting 6-year-old Kaia Rolle for throwing a tantrum at her Orange County, Fla., charter school. The video, shared by Kaia’s family with the Orlando Sentinel on Monday night, begins…
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The Ancestry Trap: This Geneticist Wants to Shift the Focus From DNA Testing to Black Futures
Dr. Janina Jeff can tell you just about anything you want to know about genetics testing: How does it work? What can it tell you? How do you spell mitochondria again? But Jeff herself has never taken a DNA test. “It still sits on my shelf,” she told The Root in a recent interview. A…
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Alabama Prepares to Execute Man Found Responsible for Murdering 3 Police Officers—Without Pulling a Single Trigger [Corrected]
If all goes to plan, Alabama will execute Nathaniel Woods next week, a black man convicted in 2004 of murdering three officers at a dope house in Birmingham, making him the first prisoner executed in the state this year. The thing is, Woods didn’t pull the trigger, a fact not disputed by the prosecution or…
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Saudi Authorities Call for Arrest of Black Saudi Woman Over Her Music Video 'Girl From Mecca'
It was written to be an anthem of empowerment, expressing joy and affirmation in being a woman from Mecca: “A Mecca girl is all you need,” rapped Ayasel Slay in her recent music video, “Bint Mecca” (or “Mecca Girl”). “Don’t upset her, she will hurt you.” Slay, a black Saudi woman, features other black women…
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Rebels of Black History: How ‘Joy Goddess’ A’Lelia Walker Created Revolutionary Spaces for the Artistic and the Sensual
She helped artists and intellectuals be the fullest versions of themselves in a country that treated blackness and queerness as a crime.
