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Government Confirms That It’s Coming After Facebook
If you are like most of us, after all of this news dropped about the Facebook-user-information breach, you have been looking at the once-daily site (yes, I am over 40) with a sustained side eye. The U.S. government, too, has some issues with the behemoth social media platform. On Monday the Federal Trade Commission confirmed…
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New York Governor Jokes That Jews Have No Rhythm at Black Church
Perhaps New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was talking about a particular man of the Hebrew faith when he joked that Jews have no rhythm. But still … The 60-year-old governor, who is facing re-election this year, made his remarks before a packed, mostly African-American church in Harlem on Palm Sunday. Most likely trying to find…
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Beyond ‘the Talk’: How I Plan to Address Police Violence Against Black Communities
My son is only 5 years old and we’ve already had “the talk.” I can recall being a little older when my grandfather, a probation officer, had the same talk with me. It’s the same talk that has been given time and again in black families following the deaths of Eric Garner, Terence Crutcher and…
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I’ll Always Love Big Poppa: How Biggie Smalls Helped Me Understand My Parents’ Deaths
On March 9, 1997, rapper Biggie Smalls, born Christopher Wallace, had his life taken way too early. He was 24 years old. He was gunned down after leaving an industry party in Los Angeles, six months after the death of rapper Tupac Shakur. Being from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and seeing how this entire New York City…
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GirlTrek Takes Over The Root’s Instagram and Walks the Underground Railroad in #HarrietsGreatEscape
She was and continues to be our Moses. Harriet Tubman, the ultimate freedom fighter and warrior woman—before we even heard of a Dora Milaje—was liberating enslaved black folks through the Underground Railroad for years in a holy act of selflessness and courage. In honor of Tubman, GirlTrek, the largest national public health nonprofit and movement…
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Sade’s ‘Flower of the Universe’ Dropped, and It’s Everything We Hoped For
In a surprise treat just days before the release of the highly anticipated Disney flick A Wrinkle in Time, producer No I.D. released Sade’s new single from the film, “Flower of the Universe,” on Twitter Monday night, to the collective swoon of us all. Yes, the woman who has soundtracked the love stories of so…
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New Orleans Police Kept a Secret, CIA-Backed Policing System for Years; Guess Who It Targets?
As if the police weren’t scary enough. A new investigative article recently published by the Verge offers comprehensive and detailed evidence that a Silicon Valley company, Palantir, has provided software to the New Orleans Police Department since 2012. The technology, implemented after New Orleans’ murder rate was the highest in the nation, traces so-called criminals’…
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Is Anyone Shocked That Slavery Continued a Century After Emancipation?
Given the state of the world today, and being a black woman in America, I’m rarely shocked, especially when it comes to racial terror and exploitation. But admittedly, I was taken aback when an African-American historian and genealogist presented actual documentation of black communities in the Deep South that were enslaved well into the 1960s.…
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Sometimes You Gotta Cry Till You Laugh: Comedian Biniam Bizuneh Takes on Black Depression in Commercial Parody
Biniam Bizuneh moved from Indiana to Los Angeles six years ago to pursue comedy. Since then he’s made a good go of it, most recently as a staff writer on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and after that, making his televised stand-up debut on the Viceland show Flophouse. Right now he’s writing and starring in the Comedy…
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A New Report Examines the Close, Sometimes Fraught Relationship Between Black Twitter and the Media
Black Twitter, the “social media subculture” that has morphed into a thing unto itself, not only shines a light on underreported news and trends from within the black community—it has also given others entree into the complex, creative and assuredly hilarious way that black folks engage with the world. Though Black Twitter’s popularity probably peaked…
