• Prince Estate Sues to Block ‘Unauthorized’ Release of New Songs

    If you were planning to drop a few bills on that new Prince EP, you might want to hold up a minute. The Prince estate has filed a lawsuit to block the release of the new six-song EP called Deliverance, which is slated for release on Friday, the one-year anniversary of Prince’s death. The estate…

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  • Forget That White Lady’s Emmett Till Painting; These Black Artists Are Truly Representing at the Whitney Biennial

    At this year’s Whitney Biennial, the award for the most discussed and divisive piece of art easily goes to white artist Dana Schutz’s painting of the dead body of Emmett Till called Open Casket. The painting has provoked protests and sparked debates about white exploitation of black trauma, freedom of expression and censorship. As a…

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  • 7 Times Harriet Tubman Was a Badass Superhero

    Harriet Tubman is having a moment. Right now she is the “it” girl of history. No longer relegated to the pages of schoolbooks during Black History Month, the freedom-fighting, self-liberating she-warrior and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad is getting the recognition she so richly deserves. Last year the Treasury Department announced that Tubman would replace…

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  • Watch: SNL’s Skit About Drugs That Sound Like Black Names Is Just Dumb, Racist Trash

    Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer made her debut as host of Saturday Night Live last night. I’ll confess I missed it because I had better things to do on a Saturday night. But then this dumb-ass skit of Spencer playing a woman who’s suing a drug company because they stole the names of her family…

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  • Federal Court Says It’s Totally Not Racist to Ban Dreadlocks at Work

    A federal appeals court ruled that employers who ban dreadlocks in the workplace are not engaging in racial discrimination, according to the Huffington Post. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 3-0 last week to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of a 2013 lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Chastity…

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  • The 7 Most Outrageous and Racist Acts Found in DOJ’s Report on Baltimore Police Department

    The Department of Justice’s scathing report on the Baltimore Police Department spelled out in exacting detail how the BPD violated the constitutional rights of black residents through a series of brutal and abusive tactics that basically had a community under siege. Perusing the pages of the report is like reading some bizarro crime novel, where…

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  • MLK’s Daughter Calls Out Trump for His 2nd Amendment Comments

    Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who seems to be plagued by a permanent case of foot-in-mouth disease, dropped another doozy Tuesday in Wilmington, N.C. During a campaign speech, Trump suggested that if Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton were to win, she would appoint Supreme Court justices who would abolish the Second Amendment (Clinton has never…

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  • Former NFL Coach Dennis Green Dies at 67

    Former NFL coach Dennis Green, who led the Minnesota Vikings and Arizona Cardinals over 13 seasons, died Thursday night from complications of cardiac arrest, according to ESPN. He was 67. In 10 seasons with the Vikings, he led the team to eight playoff appearances and reached the NFC Championship Game twice, in 1998 and 2000.…

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  • The 8 Wokest White People We Know

    #Woke is having a moment. As The Root contributor Lawrence Ware notes, because of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, “The masses of black folks who were lulled to sleep by economic opportunity have now awoken to the fact that race is, and will remain, a central part of the black experience.” But…

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  • Prince Stopped Cursing in His Music Because of Muhammad Ali

    Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, was one of the most inspirational figures in the world, both inside and out of the boxing ring. His words and deeds were a call to action for many, but it was the words he didn’t use that led Prince to stop cursing in his music. The artist known for some of…

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