culture
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How 1 Black Woman Goes Inside Fla.’s Toughest Prisons to Help Inmates Get ‘Free on the Inside’
Facing a decade and a half in prison couldn’t stop her. Losing a loved one to suicide didn’t destroy her. Battling loss and pain while raising three children was not enough to make her quit. “Black Girl Magic” is a beautiful phrase. It summons up the image of some supernatural divination that has been arbitrarily…
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Joel Osteen Sounds a Lot Like Donald Trump
Joel Osteen has been having a tough time; some of it due to Hurricane Harvey, which ravaged parts of Texas, and most of it due to his response to it and now-revisionist storytelling (can we say “lying” and not be struck down?), akin to the current president and resident liar in chief, Donald Trump. Let…
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The Root 100 No. 1s: Shonda Rhimes Changes the Face of Television Forever
The pop-cultural impact of Shonda Rhimes cannot be overstated, although at this point, it’s hard to imagine TV without her forceful, casually diverse, complicated and occasionally ruthless characters who fall outside of what was heretofore the “norm” (read: white, heterosexual male protagonists and their stories). In fact, one could argue that the writer, producer and…
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When Dancing Soothes the Soul
I’ve always loved to dance. I’d spend hours transfixed whenever dancers from the ballet or Soul Train were on TV. We were poor and immigrant in Stillwater, Okla., so there weren’t that many opportunities to see anything live. We also couldn’t afford dance lessons, so there were no recitals or classes for me. I would…
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The 10 Worst Co-Workers Ever
It is Labor Day. Before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Labor Day was the only black holiday. I’m pretty sure it originated as the day when slaves commemorated the end of cookout season. I think that’s right. Or maybe it symbolized the beginning of HBCU homecoming season. Perhaps it was meant to be a day…
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Can Brooklyn, NY’s J’Ouvert Retain Its Traditional Spirit Under a New Security Crackdown?
In 1881, British colonial authorities in Trinidad attempted to suppress the Canboulay, a predawn ritual with drumming, horns, dancing and torchlit parades commemorating the end of the sugarcane harvest. When police showed up to stop the procession, revelers fought back and won the right to parade. The so-called Canboulay riots are now commemorated annually during…
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Making Sure Your Houston Relief Money Is Going to the Black Folks Who Need It Most Isn’t Easy
Houston state Rep. Shawn Thierry’s majority-black district houses nearly 200,000 residents, the Houston Texans football stadium, and a massive population of folks who were already low-income and living from paycheck-to-paycheck. They were all in the eye of the storm when Hurricane Harvey hit. “It’s really that bad,” Thierry, a single mom of a 4-year old,…
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One of the Worst Things White People Ever Did to Black People Happened This Week
I think we can all agree that the global, multinational enterprise called the trans-Atlantic slave trade, built on a business plan of kidnapping, torture and rape, is the worst thing white people ever did to black people. They wrote it into the Constitution. They codified it. They screamed for liberty and justice while blithely doing…
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‘Everyday It Rains’: A Root Editor’s Personal Struggle Through the Hell of Hurricane Harvey
Editor’s note: Yeats (or perhaps Achebe) was right: Things fall apart. And for The Root’s Senior Editor Kirsten West Savali, in the last year, those three words have become like a living mantra. At the beginning of the summer, West Savali, 37, and her husband, Savali Savali, 40, urgently uprooted their family of five (six, counting…