culture

Jamal, a gay black man, was diagnosed 10 years ago with HIV. He can’t hold a job, battles drug addiction and suffers from serious depression. He has no car, and public transportation isn’t an option without help. Years of poor health, mental illness, lack of family support and the daily grind of coping with the…

God really does watch over babies and fools. It was around this time eight years ago when I took my first HIV test. I was 31 years old, and it was just before I got married. My wife and I wanted to make sure that we were both HIV-negative. It seemed like the right thing…

The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores some of the arguments in his new book Lincoln on Race and Slavery and the related PBS series “Looking for Lincoln.” On the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator’s birth Gates tackles the important and troubling question “Was Lincoln a racist?” And there is no end of interest…

By now you’ve gotten tagged, oh, 6 million times. The Buzz must admit we’re only mere mortals, and even we have succumbed to the “25 Random Things About Me” Facebook craze in the same herd-following way we signed up for Facebook in the first place. In the course of these taggings, we’ve learned more than…

The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs — the most since December 1974 — and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Economists had forecast a loss of 540,000 jobs and a unemployment rate of 7.5…

NBA fans, meet your new superstar, Kevin Durant. If that last sentence seems a little strange, then it’s because Kevin Durant has been presented to basketball fans as a superstar for two years now. He was Player of the Year in college, won Rookie of the Year last season. From Day 1 in the NBA,…

Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card went reverse uppity this week, appearing on Inside Edition to scold President Barack Obama for relaxing George W. Bush’s Oval Office dress code, mandating coats and ties at all times for gentlemen (and Burkas at all times for ladies, we presume?). Although coverage of the new rules,…

Somewhere out there is a biopic worthy of the many talents of pediatric neurosurgeon, author and motivational speaker Ben Carson, he of the spectacular surgeries and the bestselling books. The man’s got a story to tell, and in this age of Obama, stories that celebrate the life of black intellect are welcome, indeed. Too bad…

Barack Obama stood, jacket off and sleeves rolled, shouting into his mic and straining to be heard over the roaring crowd that turned up to welcome him back to Kenya. It was August 26, 2006, and the world was already watching. The young senator was just a few months away from launching his improbable bid…

One thing is clear about the new Congress and the Obama administration: They agree on the fact that health care reform, broadly, must be among the first policy challenges tackled in 2009. Indeed, the first nomination hearing the new Congress held upon convening in January was for Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice to lead the Department…