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Get Yourself a Friend Like Rod: The Top 8 Ride-or-Die Friends on Black TV
The movie Get Out will make you re-evaluate your life choices: whom you date, what kinds of dinner invitations from white people you’ll accept, and your friendships. Definitely your friendships. Because if there is one shining moment in the disturbing horror that is Get Out, it’s Chris’ ever-present, ever-woke, ever-common-sense-spouting best friend, Rod Williams of…
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How Umar Johnson Cured Me of Being a Hidden Hotep
I am a recovering hidden Hotep. Mind you, not the ankh-wearing, incense-selling, lecture-women-about-their menstrual-cycles kind of Hotep. I was more Hotep-adjacent. Hidden beneath my public-Ivy education and functional relationship with my parents lurked a man who would disappear down YouTube click holes of Tariq Nasheed, Professor Griff, ZaZa Ali and, of course, Dr. Umar Johnson.…
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Black Male Ego Sinks Black Woman Magic in St. Louis Election: Tishaura Jones Loses Mayor’s Race by 888 Votes
If there was a nexus between the Black Lives Matter movement and the pussy-hat-wearing, International Day of Women post-Trump-election movement, it should have been the St. Louis Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday. St. Louis has never had a female mayor, and the top two candidates were Lyda Krewson, a 64-year-old white alderman with the…
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Trump’s Game of Russian Roulette Could End in 1 of These 3 Ways
On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump woke up, looked at a few right-wing websites, realized that he was going down and started tweeting blame at former President Barack Obama. Trump, like most abusive men, can’t get over the fact that his partner’s ex, and America’s previous boyfriend, Barack Obama was pretty good. Moreover, it’s a…
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This App Lets You Take Selfies With Your Dead Relatives
For a generation raised on The Matrix and two seasons of Black Mirror, we clearly have not learned enough lessons about technology running amok. This week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the question “Can you hear me now?” went a little further than trying to get in touch with someone across the…
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Stomp the Yard: Nice Try, but Republicans Still Don’t Get HBCUs
2017 is a strange time for America’s HBCUs. In the rearview mirror is President Barack Obama, whom African-American college students loved and voted for in historic numbers. At the same time, Obama was tone-deaf to the concerns of many HBCUs, and his policies gutted schools across the nation. In front of them is President Donald…
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Election to Lead Democratic Party Was a Bigger Victory for Black Voters Than You Think
Over the weekend, the Democratic Party elected Tom Perez, a Latino civil rights attorney and former labor secretary under President Barack Obama, a man whose only successful campaign was as a county official 15 years ago, to lead the party out of its lowest position in 75 years. Democrats lost 64 house seats in the…
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Groundhog Day: Democrats Must Make Sure Russia-Gate Isn’t Like 1996’s ‘China-Gate’
Name a successful president who takes campaign assistance from a “frenemy” of the United States, pretends not to know what his vice president does and does not know, and radically alters foreign policy toward the nation that helped him get into the White House. Raise your hand if you thought of Bill Clinton. As bad…
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St. Louis Mayoral Candidate Pens Savage Letter to City Paper About Its Systemic Racism
On April 4 the city of St. Louis will have its first mayoral election since the Ferguson protests in 2014. While the suburb of Ferguson has become synonymous across the nation with systemic municipal racism and corruption, St. Louis proper isn’t much better. Although the city has had “Democratic” mayors since the 1970s, city politics…
