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Beauty Queen Is 'Not American Enough'
(The Root) — Last month, Southern rapper and Academy Award winner Juicy J announced via Twitter that he was offering a $50,000 scholarship to “the best chick who can twerk.” It was a marketing strategy to gain interest in “Scholarship” — a song off his latest album, Stay Trippy — and no doubt an opportunity…
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Face-to-Face on Racial Inequality
(The Root) — On Thursday, Sept. 12, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University convened a National Dialogue on Race Day. The standing-room-only event attracted upwards of 400 people to discuss racial justice and equality in America 50 years after the March on Washington. The struggle for racial justice necessitates…
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Quote of the Day: Alain Locke on Dance
Read The Root’s coverage of Alain Locke here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute 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 Get 'It' and Keep 'It' in DC
(The Root) — “D.C. can either build you up or tear you down,” says 26-year-old Keith Benjamin. “It’s just a matter of how you manage it for yourself.” Washington, D.C., is a city with a reputation across the country for Capitol Hill dysfunction and, among some of its own young professional residents, soul-killing competition and…
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2 Black Hairstyles, 2 Very Different Reactions
Michaela Angela Davis, in a piece at CNN, lays out the very distinct receptions that two African-American hairstyles — the Afro of Dante de Blasio, the son of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio; and the dreadlocks of Tiana Parker, a little girl in Tulsa, Okla. — received in recent weeks, from the…
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What About the Pain of Mister Cee's Wife?
Nadiah Rodriguez writes at Clutch magazine that Mister Cee’s wife must be coping with a boatload of “self-doubt, paranoia and humiliation” and that her ordeal should be discussed and addressed as vehemently as her husband’s. Her pain, and even her existence, is markedly absent from the conversation about Mister Cee. The situation reminds me of…
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Women, It's OK to Rethink Whether to Get Married
In a piece for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates examines the decline in the marriage rate among black families and is not bothered it. He says that women today are determining if marriage advances “their interests as much as it once did,” and people should consider what women in the past had to endure in order…
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Chrissy Teigen's Gown Wows on Instagram
The day after their wedding, singer John Legend and model Chrissy Teigen shared a couple of breathtaking pictures from what seems to have been a beautiful ceremony. Legend shared this shot on his account of him with his groomsmen, and Teigen posted a charming picture of the loving couple. But the real winner was this…
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Man Arrested for Killing Facebook Commenter
An Oklahoma City man is in jail today, The Oklahoman reports, after being accused of murdering a man who commented on his girlfriend’s Facebook pictures. Twenty-year-old Antwion Courtez Martin has been charged with the murder of 48-year-old Edmond James Tyree. Tyree commented “damn” on a picture that Martin’s girlfriend, Sharda Perkins, shared on her Facebook…
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Larry Summers Talked Himself Out of a Job
(The Root) — How do you solve a problem like Larry Summers? (Taking a page from The Sound of Music — just pretend you’re too young to have seen this.) The economist has been the big man on campus, having served from 2001 to 2006 as Harvard University’s president, and now a top professor at…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
