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Black Movie Fridays: I Probably Quote The Wood More Than Any Other Black Movie
If you were to ask me what the most quotable black movie of all time is, I’d say, without hesitation, Coming to America. So many of the movie’s phrases are iconic and are simply part of black pop culture at this point. When somebody’s hair looks especially fresh, it is customary to remark on the…
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My Daughter Came Down With The Flu and I Learned All About My Family Medical History
The Washington, D.C. area has been hit particularly hard with the flu this season. At my daughter’s school, for instance, as many as 41 kids were out at one time. My boys’ school also felt like a ghost town on several separate days. All three of my children came down with the flu; my daughter…
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Black Movie Fridays: Love Jones Is the Iconic Black Love Movie but for Me, Brown Sugar Is the GOAT
The 1990s and early aughts were a good time for black movies. From Boyz n The Hood to Menace II Society to What’s Love Got To Do With It to sleeper classics like The Wood, almost every year we got several dope black movies that showed us some version of blackness that existed in our…
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10 Very Black (Non-Spoiler) Reasons to Go See The Photograph
The Photograph, a new black love story starring Issa “Lookin’ Like a Bag of Money” Rae and Lakeith “Can I Measure Your Tree?” Stanfield, comes out in theaters nationwide on Friday, Feb. 14 (also known either as Valentine’s Day or “National I Don’t Celebrate That Commercialized Obligation of Love Day”). I had a chance to…
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And the Skippy Goes To!: The Root's Inaugural The Blackest Awards Winners
What’s up, Black America! Now that the Oscars have come and gone and awards were given to winners and what not and henceforth, it’s time to redirect that energy back into what matters most: celebrating Blackness in all of its Black Excellence Achievement. And that is exactly what we’re doing here with the Skippies. You…
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Black Movie Fridays: Just Wright Is a Fun Romantic Comedy But It Couldn’t Have Happened in Real Life
I’m one of those people who gets hung up on the little things in movies and television shows. Like, I’ll be sitting in a movie theater minding my business watching some varying level of black cinematic excellence set in 1980-whenever, and an era-specific song will come on to really give you a sense of time,…
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The Root Presents the Inaugural Blackest Awards in Honor of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., aka 'The Skippies'
It’s awards season and that means your blood pressure and sugar levels are likely to go up and down if you spend any time paying attention to who is winning the various awards at the various awards shows. The “biggest nights” in music and movies, though, often do a fairly terrible job of acknowledging the…
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12 Thoughts, Facts, and Opinions About Tyler Perry’s Wildly Ridiculous, Entertaining Movie, A Fall From Grace
There will be spoilers. 1. Guys, A Fall from Grace is a Tyler Perry (TP) movie. At this point, there is NOTHING more indicative of what a movie will be than having the words “Tyler Perry” attached to it. Expectations should never even exist. I watch his films because they exist and because I’m rooting…
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Visiting Cape Coast and Elmina ‘Slave Castles’: In Everlasting Memory of the Anguish of Our Ancestors
When I was 12 or 13 and living in Frankfurt, Germany, my parents loaded my siblings and me into the car and we drove about four hours south and east to a small-ish town in the Bavarian region that was the site of the first concentration camp opened in Nazi Germany: Dachau. Built in 1933…
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10 Thoughts and Observations About My First Trip to Ghana (and Africa)
When I got married in October 2018, my wife and I broached the idea of going to Accra, Ghana, for our honeymoon. Now, this wasn’t a random “Let’s go to Africa!” ideation; I’d never been to the African continent in any of my travels and had wanted to go, and my wife grew up in…
