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Black Beauty Standards Can Be Just as Unhealthy as White Ones
Last week, there were plenty of reactions to an XO Jane story in which a self-described “skinny white girl” in a yoga class assumed that a “heavyset” black woman, who never said a word to her, coveted her lithe form. Whatever. That misguided essay launched hundreds of responses, including one of my own, which pointed…
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Dissecting the Chocolatey Cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue
The cover of Vanity Fair’s 2014 Hollywood issue is just oozing chocolate goodness: Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B. Jordan and Naomie Harris—just to name a few. Below is an impromptu interview, in the form of a Gchat conversation, with Elizabeth Ozemebhoya, a former staffer at a Los Angeles entertainment agency. She waxes about who’s…
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The Realities of Being the Other Woman
Television viewers turn on their flat screens and computers in an effort to escape the realities of life. However, current dramas and reality shows may force us to confront conflict in our own homes. After watching the movie and the first three episodes of Being Mary Jane, the memories of my own adulterous affair have…
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Black Boys and ADHD: Biology or Culture Clash?
A black Brooklyn couple sit in their car waiting to hear what New York City’s elite Dalton School has to say about their son now. The dad wonders: “The question is, what is it about Idris that makes him disruptive?” They take turns reading the school’s latest communiqué: “Talks out of turn continuously … impulse…
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Racial Tolerance Engraved in Stone
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. From a position firmly fixed between the mundane and the sacred,…
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Shouldn’t Every Day Be ‘Black History Month’?
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. 66:…
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Quote of the Day: Zora Neale Hurston on Prayer
You can read this quote from Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and other quotes from Hurston, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the quote in its full context here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.…
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In Defense of the Sensitive Black Man
Recently a tweet from a sister jumped out at me from my timeline. She said something like, “I can’t stand sensitive dudes. If I wanted to sit around and talk about my feelings, I would’ve called one of my girlfriends. Man up!” The sentiment wasn’t about me, but it made me think. After all, in just the past…
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I’m Young, African American, Female and … Republican!
I’m often asked, “When did you become a Republican?” And my answer is the same every time: “I’ve always been one!” My mother gave birth to me when she was 16 years old, and we received government assistance during the first few years of my life. When I was growing up, she taught me the…
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 18 Black History Events You Should Know
Despite the standard Black History Month lessons you may have been taught in school, there’s much more to the story than slavery, civil rights and an ever-growing list of “firsts.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and The Root’s editor-in-chief, who recently…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
