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Christmas Vs. Kwanzaa: The Tale of the Tape
I was raised in a fundamentalist church that believed in the seventh-day Sabbath, tambourines and neverending, four-nights-a-week services that lasted well into Arsenio Hall’s opening monologue. Apparently, God’s eternal kingdom specifically forbade rap music, brazen women who had premarital sex (if you were a man it wasn’t ok but it didn’t decrease your value) and…
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22 Cops in St. Louis Were Exposed for Racist Facebook Posts. 2 Were Fired
A “proud” Missouri “cracker” and a KKKop whose pseudonym on social media was apparently inspired by a leadership position in the Ku Klux Klan have been terminated after a watchdog group discovered Facebook posts by nearly two dozen St. Louis police officers displaying bigotry, hatred and a predilection for violence. The Metropolitan Police Department of…
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Ayanna Pressley Introduces Legislation to End the ‘Pushout’ of Black Girls
We are all magicians. This country practices a particular kind of wizardry that can make black votes disappear; turn a black radical into a whitewashed moderate and hypnotize an entire population into somehow believing that “illegal immigrants” can trespass on stolen land. But the most wondrous trick of all is how we treat black girls.…
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The Root's Clapback Mailbag: Major League Clapback
Each Friday, we wade through our emails, tweets, comments and DMs to respond to readers who are searching for feedback, validation or someone at whom they can scream the n-word without being slapped like they stole something. But not this week. When the pair of articles about Mayor Pete Buttigieg came out last week, there…
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Mother Sues City and Officer Who Killed Emantic Bradford Jr.
The mother of a 21-year-old killed by a police officer has filed a federal lawsuit against the officer and the city that employs the cop who shot and killed her son at an Alabama mall in 2018. During a confrontation on November 22, 2018, someone opened fire inside the Galleria Mall in Hoover, Ala., during…
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Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here's What Happened
The first thing you should know about me is that I absolutely hate talking on the phone. My friends, family and co-workers all know this about me. It’s not the talking that bothers me, it’s the anticipation angst from waiting for a phone call. Therapy and self-reflection have informed me that my subconscious anxiety is…
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Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF
Seven thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars. I hid it in a white Piggly Wiggly bag in the back of the dishwasher. Every single time I returned to that tiny apartment, I opened up that Navajo-white Kenmore dishwasher and made sure it was there. It was not a gift. It was not a reward. It wasn’t…
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The 2019 Rules and Revisions for Black Thanksgiving
For black families, Thanksgiving is an entirely different holiday than the traditional feast enjoyed by the dominant culture. When the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621, most black families in America weren’t invited to the festivities. In fact, legend has it that a particularly unruly enslaved African whispered to a Native Americans as they…
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Passenger Asks Flight Attendant to Move Him Because He Reportedly Didn’t Want to Sit Next to Black Girl
A negrophobic airline passenger was so concerned that blackness was a communicable disease that he reportedly asked a flight attendant to accommodate his Caucasian autoimmune disorder by moving him to another seat. Sixteen-year-old Taylor Richardson was aboard a United Airlines flight from Denver to Jacksonville, Fla. when a gentleman of the enslaver persuasion objected to…
