clapback mailbag

The Clapback Mailbag is a negro spiritual. White people love negro spirituals. They love the pain in the songs and the hope in the lyrics. If you ever want to steal shit from white people, just start singing a nineteenth-century slave song and I guarantee you they will close their eyes, lean back and enter…

I believe most people are reasonable. In fact, there is an objective legal test called the “reasonable man” theory. Basically, when a judge or jury is trying to determine whether or not someone is guilty of a crime—especially negligence—the judge or jury must ask themselves if a reasonable man would act this way. If the…

Please allow me to introduce myselfI’m a bag of white hot hateI’ve been around for four long yearsYou can read me every Friday I answer emails, DMs and tweetstrying to help you understand raceAnd when you call me the n-wordI don’t fly into a rage Pleased to meet youCan you guess who I am?Here’s a…

“Because I said so…” Growing up in predominately Black skin, I heard that phrase a lot. My grandmother, aunts, uncles and friends’ parents used it all the time. But my mother was always careful to never use it. She had this weird thing about wanting us to know why we did things. My grandfather owned…

I kinda like hate mail. More than a year ago, I promised to include more complimentary correspondences in the Clapback Mailbag. I swear I tried. It’s not that people don’t share their appreciation for The Root with us. The problem is—and I am still trying to figure out why—I don’t take compliments well. I recognize…

“The answer to all your questions is money” — Don Ohlmeyer Who is Don Ohlmeyer? Everyone knows that Don Ohlmeyer is a genius who will go down in history as one of the television industry’s greatest men. He produced and directed two Super Bowls and three Olympic Games, including the one in Munich. He ran…

Did anything interesting happen this week? This weekly column doesn’t focus on sports, so I ignored the letters about Black people doing something incredible in Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. No one cares about the Packers, Falcons, Cardinals and the Steelers winning football games. We don’t cover amateur sports, so I also disregarded all of…

Today’s mailbag is just one long story that’s actually three long stories that began a few months ago. when I wrote an article about Pete Buttigieg: From: Tammie H.To: Danielle Belton When you write articles about white people need to do this and white people did this again you are part of the problem. You…

Every week, I come on here to complain about the haters. But as Maya Angelou once said: “Every day, I thank God for indoor plumbing, toilet paper and haters. Because, without them, I’d have nothing to shit on.” Or maybe it was Will Smith. Although the visualization of that quote might make your mouth salty,…

Break’em off… Just waking up in the morning, gotta thank my bossfor giving me a day just to respondTo DMs and tweets from fuckwadsWho read our blog and get mad because we do our jobWhen we point out racism, Caucasians flip outThey troll us in the grays, but can’t get outSo they get real mad…