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This Movie Is So Good It Hurts
(The Root) — You don’t go to see 12 Years a Slave expecting a good time at the multiplex — the title alone is enough to disabuse anyone of that notion. No doubt about it, it’s a hard, hard slog, disturbing and despairing, gnawing at the spirit long after the last credits have rolled off…
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Quote of the Day: Frederick Douglass on the Color Line
(The Root) — “Though we have had war, reconstruction and abolition as a nation, we still linger in the shadow and blight of an extinct institution. Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward…
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The Republican Party's Shutdown Fail
In a bruising piece at the New York Times, Charles M. Blow writes that the 16-day shutdown of the federal government is emblematic of the danger and conflict that resides within leaders of the Republican Party. Congress has finally worked out a deal to end the government shutdown and dodge default, but not before the…
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How Weaves Reveal the Success of Natural-Hair Movement
Dara Mathis says at For Harriet that the natural-hair revolution is showing society that black women’s beauty standards are not bound to relaxer kits, weave tracks or numbered curl patterns. We take verbal arms and umbrage against the mentality that polices anything black women do with their hair. But not only that, we are fighting…
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How the GOP Lost the Shutdown Fight
(The Root) — By the time Americans finish eating Christmas turkey, recover from New Year’s Eve hangovers and start looking ahead to Super Bowl Sunday and President Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union address, the government shutdown of 2013 will already seem like ancient history. Poll numbers will shift, issues will change and members…
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'The African Americans': Henry Louis Gates Tells the Tragic Story of Slavery
At the Washington Examiner, columnist Cal Thomas asks, “Can something as tragic and immoral as slavery become, if not less tragic, then noble, even righteous, in the telling?” It can, and it does in the hands of The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in the upcoming PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,…
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Black Boys Are Not Safe on Our Streets
Editor’s note: This article contains a graphic image that may be unsuitable for young readers. (The Root) — Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Trayvon Martin’s family, has become a new face in the fight for the equal treatment (under the law) of black and brown boys. Just months after a demoralizing verdict in George Zimmerman’s…
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Are Blacks Growing More Comfortable Identifying as LGBT?
(The Root) — At a time when more laws are being put in place to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, an increasing number of African-American adults are calling themselves LGBT. An estimated 1,018,700, or 3.7 percent, of black adults consider themselves LGBT, and 34 percent of African-American same-gender couples are…
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Cory Booker Wins Senate Seat
(The Root) — On Wednesday, history was made in New Jersey as Cory Booker won a U.S. Senate seat. The outgoing Newark mayor will be the ninth African-American member of that governing body and, at 44, one of the youngest. This week’s special election, scheduled by Gov. Chris Christie, followed the abrupt death in June…
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House Stenographer Removed During Shutdown Vote
As lawmakers voted on Wednesday to end the 16-day government shutdown, a House of Representatives stenographer approached the dais and began shouting about God and Freemasons, according to Business Insider. She was promptly removed from the floor. “He will not be mocked,” a woman shouts on the recording. “This is not one nation under God.…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
