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Former Foster Child Defies Odds, Heads to UCLA Med School On Full Ride Scholarship
Growing up as a foster child, bouncing from one home to the next can be a traumatizing experience with long-term effects, but Festus Ohan hasn’t let his lot in life deter him from striving for more, but he did note that the wounds of his father abandoning him remain fresh. “I went to bed in…
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Former Foster Child Defies Odds, Heads to UCLA on Full-Ride Scholarship
Growing up as a foster child, bouncing from one home to the next, can be a traumatic experience with long-term effects. But Festus Ohan hasn’t let his lot in life deter him from striving for more, even while acknowledging that the wounds left after his father abandoned him remain fresh. “I went to bed in…
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Top University Kicked Out Student After She Was Raped
Wagatwe Wanjuki was sexually assaulted by another student while attending Tufts University. But instead of punishing her attacker, the school asked her to leave. Wanjuki, 27, is the woman behind the widely trending Twitter hashtag #SurvivorPrivilege. According to the Huffington Post, Wanjuki took to Twitter shortly after the June 6 publication of George Will’s Washington…
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5 Teens, 1 Man in Texas Face 1,300 Years in Prison for Alleged Gang Rape
On Wednesday, five teenagers attending Texas’ Waco High School and one 20-year-old man were indicted by a McLennan County, Texas, grand jury in the alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old girl, according to CBS Houston and Black News. With a total of 91 counts, the six men, between the ages of 18 and 20, could collectively…
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How a Statue of a Freed Slave Kneeling at Lincoln’s Feet Missed the Point
This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In a quiet park in the nation’s capital, the paternal figure…
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Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil
Before teams representing their countries from around the world arrived in Brazil, the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, took the opportunity to label 2014 the “anti-racism World Cup.” The declaration came after a wave of racist incidents in soccer around the world targeting black players, many of whom are Brazilian. While it’s a well-intentioned gesture and…
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Africans Have Apologized for Slavery, So Why Won’t the US?
Five years ago I stood in a slave castle on Senegal’s Gorée Island at the infamous Door of No Return. Our guide told us that once Africans walked through this doorway, which opened right into the Atlantic Ocean, they were gone forever. During the slave trade, shackled blacks were led out the door and forced…
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Will White Voters in the Black Belt Ever Get Out of Their Own Way?
In the area of the American South informally known as the Black Belt, cross-racial political coalitions should form naturally. After all, the poverty rate in the region hovers around 16.5 percent and cuts across racial lines. Plus, polling has shown that white Southerners hold populist views similar to those of their black neighbors—the majority agreeing that…
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Black Parents, Gay Sons and Redefining Masculinity
“As a gay black man, I find myself at the top of the list of people to hate,” wrote Michael Arceneaux for The Root five years ago. “That’s a hard fact to contend with at 25, let alone at 11. The accepted notions of how a black man should look and act are confining and…
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Malia Obama Heads to Hollywood
Usually a teenager’s first summer job entails flipping burgers at a fast-food joint or folding clothes at H&M, but for soon-to-be-16 Malia Obama, it’s off to Hollywood, according to a report by TheWrap. Malia, an aspiring filmmaker and a fan of HBO’s Girls, was spotted last week working as a production assistant for a day…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
