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Kirsten Gillibrand Officially Announces Candidacy For President
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand officially declared her candidacy for president this morning in a video announcement. She joins an already crowed field of candidates, including frontrunners Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Before today, Gillibrand was still in the exploratory phase. Her announcement comes as no surprise, as she has been traveling regularly Iowa,…
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New York City Gets An 'F' When It Comes To Awarding City Contracts To Black-Owned Businesses, According To City Comptroller
New York City sucks when it comes to awarding contracts to women and minority-owned businesses, according to the city comptroller office’s grading scale, as detailed in its 2018 report. Most of the city’s departments received a “D” for the fourth consecutive year for doling out a minuscule $1 billion in contracts (just 5.5 percent) to…
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Rep. Elijah Cummings Threw Rashida Tlaib Under the Bus to Dry an Obama Birther’s White Tears
White people don’t need black folk to comfort them and their white tears. U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings apparently didn’t get the memo. During Michael Cohen’s congressional hearing Wednesday, GOP Representative Mark Meadows pushed back against the former Trump lawyer’s assertions that President Donald Trump is racist. He did so by trotting out Lynne Patton, his…
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Exclusive: Kamala Harris Calls for Decriminalization of Sex Work, Unequivocally Calls Trump a Racist and Wants Reparations (Sort of)
U.S Sen. Kamala Harris, a frontrunner in the burgeoning 2020 race for the Democratic nomination for president, is addressing criticisms of her criminal justice record and, more recently, her stance on reparations. Harris told The Root that she supports reparations for black people, but that is not precisely what she told The Grio’s Natasha Alford…
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Detroit: Why The D Is the Blackest City of All Time
If I had to pick a song that defines my hometown of Detroit, it would be Dej Loaf’s “Try Me” because white supremacy has been trying to stamp a nigga out of this fine city since the Great Migration landed us there at the turn of the 20th century. We came up to Detroit to…
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In an Interview With The Root, Julián Castro Calls for Reparations for Black People
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is willing to consider a plan that would lead to reparations for black Americans. The presidential candidate made that revelation during his interview with The Root. He also expressed his views about Donald Trump’s xenophobia, how he would address police brutality (and how he dealt with the…
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What It Means That a Black Woman Is Leading Julián Castro’s Campaign for President
WASHINGTON, D.C.—When Maya Rupert walked into then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro’s office with a tricky problem to solve, she expected some resistance. It was November 2015, and the agency had long been mulling a rule that would require HUD-funded shelters to accept transgender people under their proper genders, not the ones they were…
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Kamala Harris Stands By Her Time As a Prosecutor in Breakfast Club Interview
Monday morning, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris appeared on The Breakfast Club to discuss a wide range of subjects, from her time as a prosecutor, to critiques of her blackness, to her cooking skills. The interview, which had some interesting gems, was a mix of the predictable—she mostly stood by her time as a prosecutor, which…
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Maxine Waters Calls Donald Trump a 'Bluffer' Ahead of the State of the Union Address
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters has never bitten her tongue when it comes to expressing her disdain for Donald Trump, the white-supremacist-in-chief. During an interview with The Root, Rep. Waters told us how to push back against Trump’s bully tactics, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership and how she feels empowered by the new crop of black…
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Nancy Pelosi on Stacey Abrams, Black Lives Matter and Standing Up to Trump
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is known as the woman who tells Donald Trump “no” and continues to be the backbone of the Democratic Party. Her leadership was long-questioned during the midterms until her chamber enjoyed a record-setting blue wave of progressive, ethnically diverse freshman congresswomen. Pelosi spent a few minutes with The Root sharing her…
