Search results for: “node/olopade”
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The End of Black History Month (?)
A multicultural swirl of faces came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for The Root Inaugural Ball to fete the arrival of our new president. The iconic setting and diverse crowd of revelers begged the question: Is it time to end the segregation of teaching history? Watch as The Root correspondents Helena Andrews…
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A Clean Jobs Corps
The hopeful conveners of the “Good Jobs, Green Jobs” conference held in Washington this week are convinced that they have a solution to the twin problems of a shrinking U.S. job market and the existential threat of climate change. Their answer? Green-collar employment for millions of Americans. We’ve heard of white- and blue-collar work—but green…
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Are Black Republicans Obsolete?
Today, 12 p.m.: Join the washingtonpost.com Live Online discussion on MICHAEL STEELE AND THE GOP’s FUTURE with The Root’s deputy editor Terence Samuel. ***** They are black Republicans… A rapidly disappearing political subculture that seeks legitimacy by asserting that they are something different, something special—the other dark meat. They define themselves—with a quizzical ethos of…
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First Kitchen Confidential
Samuel Kass, the 28-year-old cook who served as personal chef to the Obama family in Chicago, will be cooking nightly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, White House Social secretary Desirée Rogers confirmed for The Root. Kass, who will hold the title of assistant White House chef, is also the son of Robert Kass, Malia Obama’s former…
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Grand White Party
The GOP has a problem. Well, two. One of them has just been inaugurated with an approval rating near 70 percent—but the other is going to be just as hard to fight. You see, as former Bush speechwriter David Frum put it on NPR, the Republican Party is the “party of white America.” And in…
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Black President, White Hands?
In the four years since the “skinny kid with a funny name” vaulted to national prominence, President Barack Obama’s face has been subject to countless artistic riffs and interpretations—many of them for sale. Kitschy knickknacks inspired by Obama, from “rednecks for Obama” T-shirts to “the audacity of soap” cleaning products, are a boom industry. None…
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Of Thee, I Sing
In 1939, an American contralto singer named Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered a rousing hymn to her country—even though she was barred, as a black woman, from performing at the nearby Constitution Hall. On Inauguration Day 2009, Aretha Franklin called the same song—”My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”—back from…
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Still 'On Fire'
On Election Night 2008, a jangling, inter-ethnic mob in Washington, D.C. toasted Barack Obama’s presidential victory, stopping traffic at 14th and U streets—the same crossroads where, 40 years earlier, in April, Bobby Kennedy had signed autographs at a campaign rally, and where Stokely Carmichael and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had crouched,…
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The Inaugural Poet
The selection of Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander to write and deliver a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama marks not only the return of poetry to a place of prominence in presidential history (she is only the fourth to read at a presidential swearing-in), but represents a true mind-meld between the president-elect…
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Best of 2008: Dayo Olopade's Picks
GOODBYE TO A STANDUP BROTHER : Since his sudden and untimely death on June 13, it’s been said that no newsman would have enjoyed Campaign 2008, and its historic climax, more than Tim Russert. Gwen Ifill’s smart and surprisingly emotional reflection, “Goodbye to a Stand-Up Brother,” on the death of NBC’s Washington bureau chief is…