culture
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Farewell, Kobe, It’s Been Real
On Wednesday, Los Angeles Laker guard Kobe Bryant plays his last game in the NBA after a storied 20-year career. In that time, he became a five-time NBA champion, a two-time NBA Finals MVP, an 18-time NBA All-Star (with four All-Star MVP trophies) and one of the few players who easily fit into any conversation…
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Questions From BuzzFeed’s ‘27 Questions Black People Have for Black People,’ Ranked From Least to Most Terrible
Along with being so remarkably tone-deaf that its tone-deafness felt intentional, BuzzFeed’s now infamous “27 Questions Black People Have for Black People” actually raised more questions than it answered. Namely, who green-lit this? Were the people in the video actors reading from a script? Or did they come up with their own questions? And where…
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Why I Stopped Caring About Baseball
Growing up, I was fortunate enough to play several organized sports at varying levels from early youth through high school. I played soccer and basketball, ran both track and cross-country, gave football a short stint. In college I took badminton as one of my physical education requirements, and apparently my particular class was so good,…
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Marrying Young: Why the Worst Dating Advice in the World Actually Worked (for Me)
Chances are, if you were a normal college student, you were a terrible person to date. Who really knows anything about being a quality partner at 18, 19 or even 20, 21 years old? Most of us at that age were just trying to find ourselves (or find ourselves in someone else’s pants). Now that…
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Yoga Is for Everybody—and Every Body
Next up in The Root’s minority-health video series during National Minority Health Month is yoga. Yoga is not just about stretching. Beyond the intricate poses often associated with hatha yoga, the practice is about watching the breath, aligning the spine and clearing the mind. In 2003 Shelley Nicole learned that she had a hiatal hernia, which…
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If You’re Trying to Control Your Man Like He’s a Kid, He Might as Well Go Live With His Mama
Dear Demetria: I live with my boyfriend and I have a car that he drives. He mostly uses it to go to the store and such. No problem. This weekend, I asked him to go to the market with me. He didn’t want to go. I went with my girls and spent, like, four hours…
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Group Dinners Are Awful. Stop Having Them
Getting older seems to come with a fair amount of side effects—increased joint pain, indigestion, tooth sensitivity, general peevishness about being awake after 11 on a weeknight. Some of these are just general consequences of your body letting you know that you, too, are slowly decaying from years of treating your body like Play-Doh with…
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Love, Duty and Politics: Ta-Nehisi Coates Takes on Marvel’s Black Panther
Last week the first issue of Marvel’s new Black Panther comic broke sales records and sold 300,000 issues in the first printing. Meaning that a comic book about a black superhero sold more copies than the daily circulation of the Baltimore Sun, Washington Times or Boston Globe. Why? It probably has a lot to do…
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5 Black Alternative Candidates Black America Should Consider for President
As Barack Obama’s second presidential term winds to a close, black Americans are contemplating the sad prospect of holding their noses when they cast their votes for the next commander in chief. Instead of choosing the lesser of the remaining evils, here are five choices you should consider for the next black president of the…
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When R. Kelly Is Your ‘Brother,’ You Make Statements Like This
Erykah Badu, a musical genius who is one of my favorite artists, ignited a Twitter storm Monday night with her controversial statements on rape culture and sexuality, tweeting that she agreed with an article in which a school required girls to wear longer skirts so as not to serve as “distractions” for heterosexual male teachers.…