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Maybe We Don't Celebrate DC's Emancipation Day Because We're Not Actually Free
Today, April 16, marks the date 158 years ago, when Washington, D.C., became the only American jurisdiction to end slavery by paying $1 million in ransom to slaveholders to free the 3,100 people enslaved in the nation’s capital. This holiday may be D.C.’s best kept secret. Public commemorations have been shrinking every year. Perhaps we…
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Street Harassment and the New Rules of Engagement
One of the cool things about moving through urban public space is what happens when you cross paths with your fellow humans on the street. In the mid-1990s, when I first moved to Washington, D.C., I quickly learned to say the requisite “Hey, how you doing?” to passersby. And in my parents’ native Georgetown, Guyana,…
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Black Boys and ADHD: Biology or Culture Clash?
A black Brooklyn couple sit in their car waiting to hear what New York City’s elite Dalton School has to say about their son now. The dad wonders: “The question is, what is it about Idris that makes him disruptive?” They take turns reading the school’s latest communiqué: “Talks out of turn continuously … impulse…
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Slavery Isn’t Just Black People’s Burden
I don’t have much of a poker face. This became obvious this spring when I toured Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home in Charlottesville, Va., for the first time. I watched a 60ish white tour guide stumble over a question about Jefferson’s black descendants, then awkwardly change the subject. I cocked my head to the left.…
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'The Butler': Good but Falls Short of Great
(The Root) — Going out to the latest Big Black Movie has been political for a long time. We don’t like how we are portrayed in film, so black people show up en masse at worthy opening nights. We want to reward film investors who show us doing more than just twerkin’ and jerkin’. We…
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A Crash Course in Symbolism
(The Root) — These days, Deandre Poole spends more time than he’d like at home, staring at a computer screen, grading assignments and answering student questions for a communications course at Florida Atlantic University. “Teaching online is a new experience,” he told me Friday, on the phone from his home in South Florida. “It’s very…
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Confessions of a Black Education Reformer
Writing for The Root DC, Natalie Hopkinson explores Andre M. Perry’s take on school discipline, which she calls “one of the realest, toughest calls reforming schools have to make.” “We can’t teach every child because Clarence is a terror,” he pleaded to the discipline committee. “He disrupts the environment.” But the CEO of the charter…
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When Booting Out 'Bad' Kids Wastes Their Potential
“While dumping problem students from your books like a subprime loan is effective business management,” writes The Root’s contributing editor Natalie Hopkinson at The Root DC, “it’s also a deeply unethical way to operate a system of public education.” … To many, this is the point of choice: Schools need the “freedom” to boot out…
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Is School Reform About Replacing Blackness?
The Root’s contributing editor Natalie Hopkinson writes in a piece for The Root DC that the “choice” movement is “about an escape from poverty and an escape from blackness, too.” It’s a great question — one that gets to the heart of the tensions over “urban” school reform. What will our schools look like once…
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Are Gentrified Cities Too Greedy?
(The Root) — Several weeks ago I was a guest on a New Orleans radio station talking about culture, gentrification and parallels between two Chocolate Cities: Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. I spoke of police antagonism toward Washington’s indigenous go-go music and the cultural impact of gentrification on historically black neighborhoods like the area around…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
