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This Trump/Ukraine/Impeachment Story Is Doing Too Much, So We’re Gonna Update This Post as Shit Happens
Donald Trump’s apparent attempt to persuade a foreign government to sic the Ukrainian Sherlock Holmes on Joe Biden has created a maelstrom of constantly breaking news stories. Democrats are impeaching, Republicans are obstructing, the president is whining, whistles are blowing, reporters are reporting and I’m pretty sure I read something about a partridge in a…
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Read the Full, Annotated Phone Call of Donald Trump Soliciting Foreign Election Interference
There’s no longer any doubt that Trump did it. On Wednesday morning, the White House released a memorandum of a conversation detailing the July 25 phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Although many are referring to this as a transcript, it is actually compiled from presidential note-takers because the…
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Nancy Pelosi Announces Plans to Launch Impeachment Inquiry
Metia hates the grits pot. Whenever it was time to tidy up the house, all the kids in my family had a specific job. Even when our cousins came to visit, they knew the rules. Some people mopped, others swept and we all took turns washing the dishes after a meal. My older cousin Metia…
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Donald Trump Can’t Stand That Obama Won a Nobel Peace Prize and He Never Will
“What do you play?” If you are a black male on a large, predominantly white college campus, you’ve likely answered this question when someone—usually a white person—innocently assumed you play a sport that landed you at their prestigious university. As a 16-year-old freshman at SEC football powerhouse Auburn University, I stood 5’5” and weighed 120…
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The Trump/Biden/Ukraine Story, Explained Via Game of Thrones
As the story behind Donald Trump’s alleged request asking Ukraine’s president to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential race grows more convoluted, we thought we’d explain it with a slightly less fantastic metaphor—Game of Thrones. Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe that gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It separates the…
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Black Twitter Drags Bette Midler for Telling Beyoncé to Clean Up White Women's Mess
“De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” — Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Do me a favor. Before reading this, open another tab and Google “Beyoncé Vote.” Because when I call Bette Midler stupid, I don’t want anyone to think it is an insult. Google returned 21 million results when…
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Robert F. Smith Gets the Final Bill for His Gift to Morehouse—and the Number Is Stunning
When philanthropist and entrepreneur Robert F. Smith offered to pay the entire balance of the outstanding student loans for Morehouse’s most recent graduating class, not only did the gift eliminate a burden from the backs of hundreds of students but it also sparked a much-needed conversation about student debt and its disproportionate impact on black…
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The Root’s Clapback Mailbag: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
Each and every Friday, The Root sorts through the emails, tweets, direct messages and comments we received that week to find out exactly what is on our readers’ minds. Over the years, we discovered that the people who read The Root are mostly concerned with one thing: They want to teach us a lesson. So…
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Taylor Swift Claims She Had No Idea She Was a White Supremacist Icon Because She ‘Didn’t Have the Internet’ on Her Phone
As some of the largest and most respected news outlets in America (unless you count Fox News, which is huge in Whitekanda) reported that alt-right and Neo-Nazi groups were celebrating Taylor Swift as the idealized Aryan Goddess, the unseasoned singer of hits I could probably Google if my computer browser didn’t have a “bullshit blocker”…
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Wrestling Ref Gets 2-Year Suspension for Forcing Black Student to Cut ‘Unnatural’ Dreadlocks
The racial slur-spewing New Jersey high school wrestling referee who forced a black student to cut his dreadlocks has been suspended for at least two years after a civil rights investigation resulted in implicit bias training, a legal warning from the NJ Attorney General and a rule change for black athletes across the state. In…