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Dear Mr. President: Congratulations on That Nobel Peace Prize
To say you’ve had a banner year is an understatement. Who else can claim they ascended to the presidency of the United States, got a new dog, replaced the bowling alley in their new house with a basketball court and hosted house parties with Earth, Wind and Fire and Stevie Wonder? Most people couldn’t imagine…
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South Africa's Reality Bites
This summer, I spent six weeks in Cape Town teaching human rights to a multiracial group of South Africans and Americans—many of whom wanted to party on Long Street more than they wanted to study human rights. Still, I managed to get their attention long enough for us to focus on two recurring issues—housing and…
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Why Sex Makes Lousy Diplomacy
Fed up with the unrest that threatens to throw the country into the kind of violent turmoil that followed the 2007 elections, a group of women in Kenya took matters into their own hands. The Women’s Development Organization spearheaded a weeklong strike in which they called on Kenyan women to withhold sex from their husbands…
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Chris Brown’s Missing Preschool Lesson
Read the washingtonpost.com Live Online discussion on CHRIS BROWN’S MISSING PRESCHOOL LESSON with The Root’s Lisa Crooms. ***** My son Joel fancies himself a crooner. Over the holidays, he would sing into the shampoo bottle in the bathroom, belting out “This Christmas” with his eyes closed, like he was headlining a concert. So as I put…
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1-800-Who’s-Your-Daddy
I’m prepared to share a dirty little secret that many of my colleagues at Howard University School of Law would probably prefer I keep to myself. Some of our students are serious lawyers-in-training who seize every opportunity they can to keep abreast of the latest legal developments and to immerse themselves more deeply in the…
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The God Gap
I was raised Baptist and spent more time in church than I thought any normal adolescent should. As soon as I left Atlanta and landed in Washington, D.C., I was determined to take full advantage of my new-found freedom. One of the first choices I made as a freshman at Howard University was choosing not…
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Confessions of a Black Feminist
In 1975, my parents’ marriage ended. My mother and I moved to Atlanta where Maynard Jackson opened Atlanta as the gateway to the New South. For the first six months, we lived near the intersection of Bankhead Highway and I-285, in what is now called the Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway Corridor – a place made…
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Who Wasn’t in New Orleans with Tavis
In one of my favorite episodes of “The Boondocks,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. awakens after 32 years in a coma. Confronted with the black community, circa 2006, Dr. King is appalled. BET, Michael Jackson and “Soul Plane” are among the things that push Dr. King to the point of calling us “trifling, shiftless, good-for-nothing…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
