Writing at Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Katherine Wheatle laments that the term “bullying” has been watered down because anyone who feels different feels free to invoke it. Proper use of the term should really focus on who has power, she argues.  In September 2010, columnist Dan Savage started the It Gets Better Project as a…

(The Root) — 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 Institute for African and African American Research. In May of 1861, a strikingly original painting was exhibited at the annual show…

Ebony‘s Tracey Ross argues that the program Drag Race is an important vehicle for exploring the intersection of race, sexual orientation and gender — one not seen anywhere else on television.  The reality show, a cross between a beauty pageant and a lip-synching competition, pays homage to the drag ball culture born out of the Harlem Renaissance…

In a piece for the Huffington Post, Sonia Ospina calls the civil rights group’s alignment with the soda industry an example of “leadership failure” — but the NAACP isn’t alone. Ospina outlines a five-point plan for everyone involved in this story. A New York Times article this week, “In N.A.A.C.P., Industry Gets Ally Against Soda Ban,” seems…

Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts. After four decades of solitary confinement in the nation’s most populated maximum-security prison—and one of its most historically brutal—a member of the internationally known “Angola Three” has reasonable cause to expect that he will soon be released, his attorneys and supporters say. The request to set…

(The Root) — Blacks in reality television have been front and center in the news, with the recent controversies surrounding Love & Hip Hop New York, The Best Damn Funeral Ever and the recently canceled show All My Babies’ Mamas. In the midst of all the hoopla is The Sisterhood, a reality show that explores…

As scholars and journalists had warned, priceless pieces of African history have been lost amid fighting in Mali. The Guardian reports: Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, according to the Saharan town’s mayor, in an incident he described as a “devastating blow” to world heritage.…

(The Root) — Twenty-seven years ago, on Jan. 28, 1986, the nation grieved after the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all seven crew members. One of them was Ronald McNair, an African-American physicist and NASA astronaut from Lake City, S.C. His brother Carl recently stopped by StoryCorps, an oral history archive,…