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Quote of the Day: Virginia Foster Durr on Change in America
Read Virginia Foster Durr’s thoughts on the civil rights movement 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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A Crash Course in Symbolism
(The Root) — These days, Deandre Poole spends more time than he’d like at home, staring at a computer screen, grading assignments and answering student questions for a communications course at Florida Atlantic University. “Teaching online is a new experience,” he told me Friday, on the phone from his home in South Florida. “It’s very…
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Forget Diverse Friends. Learn About Race
(The Root) — In her fourth Reddit Ask Me Anything, our Race Manners columnist, Jenée Desmond-Harris, opened herself up to more of your burning questions about race. Check out the conversation here. HannibalHarris: In the wake of a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which found that 40 percent of white people and 25 percent of nonwhite people…
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Twitter Takes on White Privilege in Feminism
(The Root) — Helping someone recognize their privilege is always a difficult, uncomfortable process. This is especially true for women of color, who often have to educate white women on the racial privilege they enjoy in the course of pushing against the misogyny they all face. The trending topic #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which trended nationally for two…
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Kendrick Lamar Takes Over Twitter
(The Root) — Big Sean gave the Internet a day’s worth of conversation and debate fodder last night when he released “Control,” a song featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica. At least, we think Jay Electronica and Big Sean are on the track. Kendrick Lamar did his very best to make sure that he’d be…
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Having a Baby With Your Gay Male Best Friend
Danielle T. Pointdujour writes at Ebony magazine about a woman who is having a baby with a man who happens to be her gay male BFF. The concept of “family” mystified me in my youth. Although people always talk of traditional families, it always seemed to me that there were slight variations on what “normal”…
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A Good Kid Shot Because He's Black?
In a poignant piece for Salon magazine, New Orleans teacher Kate Selker wonders whether racial profiling led to the shooting of one of her students. Police say that Marshall Coulter was shot in the head by neighbor Merritt Landry — who’s been charged with attempted second-degree murder — while climbing Landry’s fence. A few months…
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Single Mothers Are Good Mothers, Too
In a piece for the Feminist Wire, Rabi’a Hakima argues that despite Don Lemon’s comments, women raising children alone have value and aren’t the root cause of high rates of incarceration or poverty within the black community. She also says that Lemon’s comments perpetuate Eurocentric racism and come from a place of male privilege. The…
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Stop-and-Frisk Ruling: Winners and Losers
(The Root) — On Monday a federal judge ruled that the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, which disproportionately targets young men of color, violates the constitutional rights of New Yorkers. The ruling requires that an outside monitor be appointed to ensure that going forward, the NYPD’s practices are compliant with constitutional protections. While…
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Racism? No, It's Just a 'Misunderstanding'
(The Root) — The instructions, relayed by an editor on a Friday afternoon, detonated like a bomb over the telephone: “I don’t think a black person should write the review for this book.” The book in question looked at legal cases during the civil rights era; the black person being considered to review it was…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
