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Once Upon Once on This Island With Tamyra Gray
There are probably a few ways to read the wondrous musical Once on This Island, which originally debuted in 1990 and was revived on Broadway in New York City in December 2017. Perhaps it’s a lesson about following your heart against incredible odds. Maybe it’s a tale about the occasional perils of falling in love…
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How Physics Works and Other Things I Learned at All Star Code’s 5th-Anniversary Celebration
So I’m at All Star Code’s fifth-anniversary event at the High Line Hotel in New York City on Wednesday, and one of the program’s students, Alex Reyes, asks me if I know how the video game “Pong” works. I—who haven’t thought about “Pong,” a table tennis simulation game, in eons—realize that I have no clue…
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Why You’re Not Really Clean Unless You’ve Had a Woman Exfoliate the Crap Out of You at a Koreatown Day Spa
I thought I knew how to bathe. I’d only been doing it since I was a little kid. And I learned from the best: my mother, Deloris Belton, world’s cleanest woman from 1945 until about 2013. Whether it was a bath or a shower, with a washcloth, loofah or those little exfoliating gloves (all of…
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I Got Goddess Locs and Now I Feel (and Look) Very Regal, but … Boy, Was It a Journey
First things first, I have a lot of hair. It’s a lot even though I cut if off by several inches nearly a year ago after I decided to stop getting blowouts to give my hair a break. It’s just dense, thick hair that does what it wants when it wants and has more than…
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They Said It Was Private. She Said It Was on-the-Record. The Reality? It’s Complicated
In the nine years of BET Networks’ Leading Women Defined summit, Jeanine Liburd, chief marketing and communications officer at BET, had never seen anything like this. A journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan of the Washington Post, was booted from this conference, a first for the gathering of professional women. These women, about 150…
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Never Bring Cicely Tyson Water in a Bottle, and Other Lessons From AT&T’s Humanity of Connection Event
If I am lucky enough to make it to 93, I want to be a fly 93 just like Harlem’s own, the legend, actress Cicely Tyson. One, she dresses impeccably. Two, she’s both wondrous and intimidating. As someone who loves (and still fears) her soon-to-be 90-year-old grandmother, I can only imagine what Tyson is like…
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Finally! Power Returns July 1 and Is Already Renewed for Season 6
Did you miss Ghost and Tommy and Tasha and the gang? (Not Kanan, though; no one misses Kanan.) I know I did. Well, they, and the hit Starz show Power, are all coming back on Sunday, July 1, at 9 p.m. If you’re pumped for the upcoming season 5, be prepared to be even more…
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Be a Hero for Hire and Help The Root Make Kinja Better
Editor’s note: Thank you to everyone who participated; we got enough volunteers. Also, apologies to our non-18-to-35 readers! The firm conducting the survey was specifically interested in that age group, but that doesn’t mean if you’re over 35 we don’t love you. We love you! We read all your comments, and we all totally go together…
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Harlem Haberdashery’s 5th Annual Masquerade Ball Was ‘a Mood’
I’m back, Antisocialites! After spending most of the winter trying to both not freeze outdoors and not die from the sauna that is my radiator-heated apartment, I have to say, I really didn’t go to any parties. Oh, I went out on the rare occasion, but my social life (and this column about my social…
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So … Will Hollywood Finally Learn This Lesson, or Nah?
When writer-director Jordan Peele won his Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 2017’s biggest hit, Get Out, I cheered. When cast members of 2018’s biggest hit so far, Marvel’s Black Panther, walked the red carpet at the 90th Academy Awards, I swooned. And when I looked out at the sea of (mostly) white people attending the…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
