• Megyn Kelly Slams Race Baiters, White Santa Remarks Were Tongue-in-Cheek

    After she was roundly criticized earlier this week for insisting that Santa is white, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly took to the air Friday to say, well, she was joking. She also hit back at race baiters, accusing them of whipping things into a frenzy just to attack the conservative station. “Humor is what we…

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  • Did Jay Z Give Up Cheddar to Stack Bread?

    For Jay Z, aka Shawn Carter, no recent month has been more favorable to his image as hip-hop’s preeminent renaissance man than his birthday month, December. As reported previously by The Shadow League, Jay recently secured a 10-year, $240 million contract for 31-year-old All-Star second baseman Robinson Cano with the Seattle Mariners on Dec. 6. This came…

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  • If Mandela Were Here: The Battles He Would Wage

    As we came together to plan the national memorial service of our world’s father, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, it dawned on me that we were planning the impossible. We were trying to package what could never fit in a box. No one title could completely encapsulate Mandela. He was a freedom fighter, a visionary, a change…

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  • Quote of the Day: Harriet Ann Jacobs on Slavery

    Read this quote and additional quotes by Harriet Ann Jacobs in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. 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. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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  • How to Stop the Killing of All Our Children

    Earlier this week I found myself on a flight to Atlanta so that I could stand in solidarity, as a father, with the parents of a murdered son. Like the few hundred others who gathered outside the Georgia state Capitol on a chilly Wednesday morning, I believed that I was seeking justice for the yet-to-be-explained…

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  • Here’s Megyn Kelly’s Kwanzaa Reading Assignment

    It’s a shame that Fox News’ Megyn Kelly wasn’t on the air Thursday night to explain why she told her viewers Wednesday night that “Santa just is white,” so is Jesus, and “those are just facts.” She left that lump of coal in our stockings, and none of her panelists even bothered to question Kelly’s…

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  • Why Was My Black Ancestor Listed as a Slave Owner?

    “I have traced my great-grandfather, Kinchen Bell, back on the 1850 Census Slave Schedule for Kentucky. He is listed in the slave owners’ column and indicated as being black. There is an adult female listed who I believe is his wife, my great-grandmother, Sarah. There are a number of minor children listed. When I went…

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  • Best Reactions to Beyoncé’s Late-Night Album Drop

    Last night, Beyoncé was kind enough to let us watch Scandal before pulling the pop music stunt of the year. Or maybe decade? Rumors of album delays and random song leaks had us waiting anxiously all year for an announcement on Bey’s fifth studio-album release date. But in lieu of an announcement, Bey just gave…

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  • In the Shadow of Newtown, a Father Grieves and Fights

    When Hartford, Conn., police arrived on the scene, they found Shane Oliver lying on the ground. The 20-year-old had been shot twice in the back. One bullet had pierced Oliver’s muscle and bone, perforated his heart and lungs and pushed its way out of the right side of his chest. Two-and-a-half hours later, Oliver—a young…

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  • An Exploration of What It Means to Be Black

    Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Yaba Blay to talk about her new book, (1) Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. Blay is an assistant professor and co-director of the Africana Studies program at Drexel University.  Her book explores mixed-race identity, what exactly is blackness, what does it mean to be…

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