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Habari Gani?! Umoja! Tarana Burke Was the Embodiment of Unity in 2017
This year, The Root is making the blackest holiday of them all great again! And for each day of Kwanzaa, we will be highlighting one person from the community who exemplifies the principle of the day. On the first day of Kwanzaa, Dec. 26, the principle is Umoja, or “unity.” To practice Umoja is to…
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Photographer Don Hogan Charles, Who Shot Iconic Photo of Malcolm X at His Window, Has Died
The first black staff photographer hired at the New York Times, Don Hogan Charles, the man who shot the iconic photo of Malcolm X at a window with a rifle, has died. Former New York Times staff writer Rachel Swarns tweeted the news Sunday afternoon, prompting many of us to wonder where the Times obituary…
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Steph Curry Says He’s ‘Really Serious’ About Owning Carolina Panthers
Perhaps a black man (or men) owning an NFL team may soon be a reality. Golden State Warrior Steph Curry recently said that he was quite serious about being interested in owning the Carolina Panthers, now that owner Jerry Richardson is selling the team after finding himself caught up in a sexual-misconduct scandal in the…
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Your Racist President Said Haitians ‘All Have AIDS’ and Nigerians Live in ‘Huts’
All the “debate” about whether Donald Trump is really, truly racist should be put to rest now. The man actually opened his mouth in public—as president of the United States—and fixed his flat lips to say that “all Haitians have AIDS and Nigerians live in huts. The New York Times recently published a report about…
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Harvard University Recognizes the Gullah Language in Its New Curriculum
Who remembers the 1990s PBS children’s show Gullah Gullah Island? For many of us, watching or hearing about the show was our first exposure to Gullah, the culture native to the Georgia and Carolina Sea Islands, which, because of their remote location, offered an unbroken chain to Africa and its cultures. And now Harvard University…
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Texas Police Call Shooting of Innocent 6-Year-Old a ‘Tragic Accident’
With reminders of the tragic death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the 7-year-old shot down as Detroit police stormed her grandmother’s house—the wrong house—in 2010, yet another innocent child has been killed by police. Six-year-old Kameron Prescott was shot and killed by a stray bullet in his home Thursday afternoon when deputies in a suburb of San…
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Watch: Cornel West Gets Real About His Beef With Ta-Nehisi Coates and Barack Obama: ‘We Got to Keep Standards Up’
As a result of Cornel West’s public criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times last month, we at The Root asked the good doctor over to our studios to have a word (this being Cornel West, many words) with me and senior reporter Terrell J. Starr. West is releasing the 25th-anniversary edition of…
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Are White Supremacists Infiltrating Law Enforcement?
You would have missed it if you weren’t listening carefully. On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, the second segment of the night was a profile of Christian Picciolini, a reformed skinhead-slash-racist-slash-dude-who-used-to-beat-black-people-up-on-the-reg; a man Dylann Roof recently called a “race traitor.” After saying that he had suffered an angry childhood in Illinois (that would be north of the…
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Recently Released Video of 21-Year-Old’s Violent Arrest in Pasadena, Calif., Leaves More Questions Than Answers
The city of Pasadena, Calif., recently released bodycam footage of an early November police stop at a gas station during which a 21-year-old was beaten bloody and suffered a broken leg.. The release of the six videos marks the first time that police-body-worn-camera video has been made public in response to a police use-of-force incident…
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Military Investigation Concludes Sgt. La David Johnson Was Not Captured, Refuting Earlier Reports That He Was Executed: Report
There’s more news on the tragic death of 25-year-old Sgt. La David T. Johnson, the circumstances around which have heretofore remained murky. An Associated Press report that broke Sunday afternoon revealed that Johnson—the young American soldier killed in an ISIS-, or Islamic State-group-affiliated ambush in Niger—wasn’t captured alive by the enemy or executed at close…
