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Black Death as Reality TV: Is Watching the Videos Too Much?
The state-sanctioned desecration of black bodies by police officers is a reality that plays on a haunting loop throughout the United States. We learn their names. We tweet their hashtags. We watch them publicly executed in grainy surveillance or cellphone recordings. Then we wait for another judge, cop or politician to tell us that we…
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Celebrating Pioneering Black Trans Women
Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox and cultural critic and author Janet Mock (both The Root 100 honorees), the stigma and ignorance surrounding both the exterior and interior lives of trans women is slowly being chipped away. The work of such organizations as the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and the Trans…
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Dear Racists: We Don’t Owe You Our Forgiveness
Last week Levi Pettit, one of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon balladeers who was busted singing a rousing number about anti-black terrorism, held a press conference during which he made a public relations statement disguised as an apology. The sheer ridiculousness of the optics quickly made the spectacle go viral. Oklahoma state Sen. Anastasia Pittman, chair…
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George Zimmerman Says God and Justice Are on His Side
If the moral arc of the universe really did bend toward justice, I would be reporting on George Zimmerman’s incarceration for one of the numerous crimes he’s committed since he gunned down unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on that rainy night in Sanford, Fla. Instead he’s in the news for a disturbing interview in which he…
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‘I Go to UVA,’ Martese Johnson’s Cry of Millennial Disbelief
Earlier this week I participated in a PBS NewsHour Twitter chat on race and millennials. We discussed members of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter, a white fraternity founded in the antebellum South, being caught on video singing one of their traditional songs about hanging “niggers” from trees. The chat was partially built…
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$65,000,000 for a New Private Jet, Creflo Dollar? Negro, Please
On the streets of any hood in the United States, Creflo Dollar, the kingpin behind World Changers Church International, would be called a hustler. Behind the pulpit, however, he’s called pastor, and if that’s not a sin, I don’t know what else to call it. Dollar, who made headlines in 2012 for allegedly assaulting his…
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Blame It on Hip-Hop: Why Morning Joe Came to SAE’s Rescue
As MSNBC continues its obvious attempts to draw conservatives away from Fox News, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have fully embraced their roles as the Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin of the network. Mocking rapper Waka Flocka Flame for canceling a scheduled performance at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat house at the…
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SAE, White Thugs and American Traditions
The Klansmen of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity have exposed to the world what many of us already know: Racism is part and parcel of white America’s most beloved traditions. By now, most people have read about SAE’s University of Oklahoma chapter and its little diddy about hanging “n—gers from trees.” There has, of course, been…
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The Contradictions of #Selma50
My pilgrimage to Selma, Ala., began at 2:30 Saturday morning. After loading up my tiny rental car, I traveled five-and-a-half hours on zero sleep to be among the number of people bearing witness to the commemoration of one of the most bloody, transformative events in civil rights history. Fifteen miles outside town, I stopped at…
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Why Malcolm X Should Be Recognized in Selma, Ala., This Weekend
The 50th anniversary of the assassination of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) came and went on Feb. 21 of this year. And just as in other years when the date of Malcolm’s assassination came around, his name trended for a few hours and then the stifling silence rolled back in, erasing his name from the…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
