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What Juneteenth and My Father Taught Me About 'Expectations'
I wouldn’t know Juneteenth without my father. He’s the Texan. He grew up celebrating the holiday that started on June 19, 1865, when slaves on Galveston Island, Texas, finally learned they’d been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation two years prior. Even though he now lived in St. Louis, he’d always make the same jokey reference…
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Capitalizing the “B” in Black Is Nice, but Actually Hiring Black People in Your Newsroom Is Nicer
At The Root, we’ve had a long-standing debate over capitalizing the “B” in black. Some of us are adamantly for it, while others (myself included) are grammar freaks who think that if we capitalize “black” we would also have to capitalize “white,” and I, personally, have no interest in that as it would continue to…
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Black Journalists and Covering the Storm That Never Passes
I knew what I was getting into. I grew up reading the newspaper daily, since about age 11. I started watching the evening news—both the local and the national broadcasts—around the same time. My earliest media memories are of the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings and the Challenger explosion the year prior. Every weekend I watched Tim…
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The Root's Danielle Belton Talks Biden's Gaffe, Trump's COVID-19 Inactions on MSNBC
Saturday during journalist Alicia Menendez’s broadcast on MSNBC, The Root’s Editor-in-Chief Danielle Belton (meeeeee!) made an appearance as a panelist discussing former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent remarks on The Breakfast Club, which the Democratic presidential candidate subsequently apologized for. In this clip, I discuss how Trump isn’t “pro-American” but is simply “pro-Trump” when it…
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The 19 Things I Cooked in Self-Isolation and What They Say About My Mental State
“I’ll do something that makes me happy.” That’s how I justified that red velvet cake I made that I didn’t even bother to put icing on, as I was so happy to eat it just plain. Greedily, like a little kid. But it was a large and I had to eventually slice it up and…
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How to Win Friends and Influence People in a Psychiatric Ward
They tried to make it nice. They festooned the rec room in plastic Christmas decorations and bought us all donuts. There was even a special meal—dressing and gravy with a slice of turkey. But store-bought donuts and cafeteria holiday dinner didn’t change the fact that we all—patients and nurses included—were spending Christmas in an L.A.…
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The Root Joins PBS' Independent Lens and the film Bedlam for a Discussion on Mental Health and Mass Incarceration
The numbers are staggering. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than one in five adults—essentially 40 million Americans—are living with mental illness, including severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, severe depression and bipolar disorder, of which I, too, am a sufferer. But when it comes to me, someone who enjoys a great career…
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Space Is the Place: Nona Hendryx Takes NYC Out of This World With the Disciples of Sun Ra
When I was a child watching reruns of Star Trek, one of the things I always wondered was … where did all the black people go? Sure, there was actress Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura and she was amazing. And later, on series like Star Trek: Next Generation there was Geordi La Forge and, even later, Benjamin…
