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It’s Time to End Profiling of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People of Color
A few years ago in New York City, a 17-year-old black transgender girl named Trina was walking down the street when she was stopped by police officers and frisked. When a warrant check came up clean, the officer looked in her purse, found condoms and then arrested her for loitering with the purposes of prostitution—the…
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Why Coins With a Black Man’s Face Were Valued
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. Struck from a set of hand-engraved dies in an ancient mint,…
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New Orleans Teachers and Students Wrestle With Racial Tension
Every year hundreds of young, idealistic recent college graduates flood into New Orleans to teach at the city’s public schools. But in a school system where the vast majority of students are African American, the mostly white influx of new teachers has brought complaints of racism and cultural insensitivity, and helped birth a new student-led…
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The NFL Is Not Ready for Michael Sam: His Kiss Disgusts Fellow Player
The News: The National Football League’s first openly gay player has drawn a wide range of reactions, from the admiration of President Barack Obama to the disgust of at least one other player. On Sunday Obama congratulated University of Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam on his selection by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh and final…
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Why I Can’t Get Behind #BringBackOurGirls
I am not against online activism. In fact, I believe in it and have been moved by its power. From typhoon relief fundraisers to voter-recruitment efforts, I have participated in these Internet-based campaigns and have seen the power that lies in we Americans when we are aligned to create change from behind our computers. It…
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Beyond Biracial: When Blackness Is a Small, Nearly Invisible Fraction
Stephanie Troutman, a 36-year-old professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., has a white mother and a black father. She has her own family’s racial elevator speech down to a single sentence: “I’m a mixed woman who has a child with a black man and a child with a white man.” Her 7-year-old son,…
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Michael Sam: What He Means to Young Gay Black Men
For every gay black boy on a playground, basketball court or football field across the country who is derided by his peers as a “f—got” or “sissy”—excluded from games and told he has no place on the team—Michael Sam is a living example that not only can they play, but they can win. “Can Michael…
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Who Was Black America’s 1st Investigative Journalist?
Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage. Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 79: Who was the first…
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Cyber-Stalker Forces St. Louis News-Anchor Off the Air
An award-winning former news-anchor says that she quit her job of 10 years after receiving threatening emails from a cyber-stalker, according to her site, TheVillageCelebration. To the dismay of scores of viewers, Vickie Newton quit her job at KMOV in St. Louis, Missouri, in July to return home to Arkansas to live with her family…
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Doors Shuttered at Nation’s Oldest Black Bookstore
Over nearly four decades, San Francisco’s Marcus Books served as a cultural Mecca for black writers, authors and just plain bibliophiles. The nation’s oldest black book store played host to scores of writers and speakers’ events, including James Baldwin, Dave Chappelle, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Willie Brown, Jackie Robinson, Angela Davis, Barry White, Wesley Snipes…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
