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If Daniel Holtzclaw’s Victims Were White, Everyone Would Know His Name
Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sexually assaulting and raping 12 women and one underage girl while on duty, is on trial this week. You may not know his name because his alleged victims are black. That fact has led to blink-or-you’ll-miss-it mainstream-media coverage and either lukewarm interest or outright apathy from almost…
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Another Black Girl Assaulted by White Cop: Do We Matter Yet?
She must have been so afraid. Sitting at her desk at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C., feigning calm, warily watching the white man in uniform approach, the black girl with the brown skin must have been terrified. It could easily have been Eric Casebolt or Daniel Holtzclaw or Timothy Loehmann or Daniel Pantaleo, but…
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About That Ebony Cosby Cover Everyone’s Talking About
You could almost hear the glass shatter when Ebony magazine’s November “Family Issue(s)” cover exploded across social media Thursday, shards of conflicting emotions piercing the soul of black America. Front and center is the Huxtable family, minus Sandra, frozen as many of us remember them: happy, beautiful and black. The smiling face of patriarch Cliff Huxtable is distorted…
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Lamar Odom’s Suspected Overdose Is Not an Episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians
Basketball fans around the world are anxiously awaiting more information about the condition of beloved former Los Angeles Laker Lamar Odom, who reportedly overdosed Tuesday afternoon at Love Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada. But all mainstream media seem to be concerned with, when not busy making the story as tawdry and sensationalistic as possible, are…
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Parchman Ordeal: Natchez, Miss., Apologizes for Shipping Hundreds of Innocent Black People to State Penitentiary
Fifty years ago, police in Natchez, Miss., rounded up hundreds of innocent, civil rights protesters and shipped them off to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Last week, the city’s mayor and Board of Aldermen publicly apologized for the grave injustice, the Natchez Democrat reports. In anticipation of the national spotlight that will illuminate the…
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Piers Morgan Tweets ‘I Love My Whiteness’ to Black Lives Matter Activist, Calls #BlackTwitter Racist
In a moment of peak whiteness, professional Twitter troll Piers Morgan responded to Campaign Zero activist DeRay Mckesson’s tweet of his signature “I love my blackness. And yours” by saying that he loved his whiteness. Peak. Whiteness. Black Twitter’s clap-back to the British media personality’s initial tweet and his subsequent disingenuous and inflammatory replies was…
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Sister Suffragette: ‘Slave’ T-Shirts Highlight White Feminism’s Race Problem
I wasn’t going to write about the white women wearing their white T-shirts to promote the white film about white feminism, but my black feminism wouldn’t allow me to ignore it. Meryl Streep stars as British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst in the film Suffragette, which is set to premiere in the United States later this…
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The GOP’s Big, White Lie: On Planned Parenthood, Racism and Convenient Christians
Escalating tensions between establishment Republicans and members of the Tea Party over Planned Parenthood has pushed the GOP into chaos and the government to the brink of another shutdown, with Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner announcing his resignation last Friday. The consensus is that Boehner decided to leave before he was pushed out, in…
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Nancy Lee Grahn Pulls an #AllLivesMatter in Wake of Viola Davis’ Historic Emmy Win
Miscellaneous-daytime-drama actress Nancy Lee Grahn wants the world to know that the Emmys are no place to discuss the marginalization of black actresses in Hollywood, because all women are discriminated against, and “dramatic” race talk distracts from the bigger picture. As previously reported by The Root, Grahn made these ridiculously racist statements on Twitter in…
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Chris Christie Believes That Harassing and Profiling Black and Latino Communities Kept NYC Safe
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, currently struggling to gain a foothold in Republican presidential-primary polls, decided to throw some red meat to the conservative base in a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, stating that if he were mayor of New York City, he would reinstate the controversial stop-and-frisk law within five minutes of taking…