The Root’s Ultimate Guide to Holiday Dos and Don’ts!
Forget What JD Vance Said — Here are 13 Times White Folks Never Apologized For Bad Behavior
NFL Might Tax Steelers’ DK Metcalf’s This Eye-Watering Sum For His Sideline Move
The Most Stunning Black Images of 2025
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Supermarket Mogul Greg Calhoun Dies at 66
Greg Calhoun, the pioneering businessman who became the first black supermarket owner in the South, building it into one of the largest black-owned supermarket chains in the country, has died at 66 years old. According to the Montgomery Advertiser, Calhoun’s daughter announced on Facebook that her father died on Thursday at 5:55 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai…
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Harvard Honors Colin Kaepernick, Others With W.E.B. Du Bois Medal: ‘Love Is at the Root of Our Resistance’
Alas, to be a fly on the wall at Memorial Hall at Harvard University Thursday afternoon. The room’s very air would be perfumed with the sweet scent of black liberation and excellence as eight prominent, distinguished, and mostly freedom fighting African Americans received the University’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from the Hutchins Center for…
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20 Years After the Murder of Matthew Shepard, Samira Wiley Speaks on the State of LGBTQ+ Rights
Samira Wiley is many things: black woman, American, actress, activist, wife and breakout star of bona fide hits Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) and The Handmaid’s Tale. She is also an out and proud gay woman—now. While OINTB is where Wiley met her wife, screenwriter Lauren Morelli, it is also where she was forced…
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Colin Kaepernick Files Trademark Image of His Face and Glorious Afro
I have written ad nauseam about former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s glorious afro, which rivals only Angela Davis for blackest and most defiant afro in American history. (Yes, you can debate me in the comments). I have also noted the historic and healing properties of Kaepernick’s afro, which has been know to cure…
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Jimmy Butler Going to Work Just to Roast His Boss and Coworkers Is the Blackest Thing That Ever Happened This Week
On Friday, I will be a part of a daylong wedding ceremony that will merge Ghanaian and African-American traditions for one glorious and black-as-the-fuck celebration. The members of the wedding party will change wardrobes three times. I’m currently in a text thread with Panama and each of the 11 groomsmen. Topics discussed over the past…
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Watch: A List of All the Things Straight Men Can’t Do Because It’s ‘Suspect’ (According to Wiz Khalifa and Many Others)
In a Breakfast Club interview in July, very tall Pittsburgher Wiz Khalifa expressed dismay at the horror of men eating bananas in public. From Page Six: “You gotta break it in half,” Khalifa, 30, told host Charlamagne Tha God. “If you bite into a banana, you sus[pect].” When Charlamagne began to protest that “it’s just…
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‘Put It on Dad’: LeBron James Admits He Gives His 14- and 11-Year-Old Sons Wine
King (Lebron) James apparently lives up to the name by doing things the Biblical way, including having his youngins imbibe on that Jesus Juice. James, who fancies himself a wine connoisseur, said his 11-year-old and 14-year-old sons also drink wine, but people should put the blame on him, not his longtime sweetheart and wife, Savannah…
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George Taliaferro, First Black Man Drafted by the NFL, Dies at 91
Trailblazer and trendsetter George Taliaferro, the first African-American player to be drafted by the NFL, died Monday. He was 91 years old. According to Bleacher Report: Taliaferro was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1949, though he never played for the team as a week earlier he had signed with the Los Angeles Dons of…
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Marriage Advice for Panama Jackson, Who Is Getting Married This Week
Three weeks ago, while Panama and I were doing a talk at Princeton University, I shared the story of how, although we first met in 2004 and started VSB in 2008, we didn’t meet in person until our three-year anniversary party in D.C. in 2011. The more I tell that story, the less sense it…
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'A Life Defined by Fear': Tina Turner Details Even More Abuse from Ike Turner in New Memoir
Most of us remember the brutality brought to life on screen in the 1993 Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It, which chronicled the entertainer’s rise to fame under the thumb and almost constant threat of abusive ex-husband and Svengali Ike Turner. The film was named for Tina’s blockbuster hit single of…