culture
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How Black Women Can Rescue the Labor Movement
After spending more than 25 combined years promoting the trade union movement and protecting the right to organize in the United States and around the world, we see the report “And Still I Rise: Black Women Labor Leaders’ Voices, Power and Promise”—named for a poem of resilience by the late Maya Angelou—as a love letter…
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Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: A Fight of Extremes
Saturday’s long-awaited Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao bout is a fight of differences. Of excess and access. Of past and present. Of crime and punishment (or lack thereof). Of the loved and the hated. It’s a fight that ultimately exposes gaps in how we think, how we feel and how we live. It underscores cultural chasms that are…
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Media’s Biased and Dehumanizing Coverage of Baltimore Fails to Tell the City’s Real Story
In what has become an all-too-familiar scene, America watched another of its cities erupt in protest this week, after yet another young black man died after interacting with police. This time the city was Baltimore and the victim was 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who suffered a severe spinal injury while in police custody on April 12.…
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‘We Are Not Thugs’
A mass of young people, 4,000 strong, locked arms Wednesday and marched from Amtrak’s Penn Station in Baltimore down to City Hall to protest the death of Freddie Gray. As they marched, a student yelled over the loudspeaker, “When you don’t say something when it’s your neighbor, what will you do when they come for…
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Poll: Will You Be Watching the Fight of the Century?
Who’s got an extra hundred bucks lying around to put in the pockets of these multimillionaire fighters? That’s the price of pay-per-view to catch what is sure to be the most-talked-about fight in decades. Latest odds are on Floyd Mayweather to defeat Manny Pacquiao in the Saturday-night match at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. If you’re…
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Your Kid’s Hair: Fight It, Put a Hat on It or Let It Be?
Your kids’ hair. They don’t want you to comb it. They never want you to comb it. Maybe they won’t sit still. Maybe they’re tender-headed and the combing hurts. Maybe they’ll just mess it right back up two seconds after you went through all that work. Maybe they’re babies. Babies are the ultimate in not…
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The Hypocrisy of Applauding the Baltimore Mom While Condemning the Protesters
Even before Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother of six who was captured on video “disciplining” her son, began making the news rounds, she was already being hailed as a hero. The video of her dragging her 16-year-old son, Michael, who was throwing rocks at police, from Baltimore’s melee and slapping him repeatedly in the face…
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Black College Students Seize Rare Chance for Career Development Through Travel-Abroad Initiative
Few African Americans will ever get the chance to visit China—a country that’s modernizing at a dynamic pace and becoming a global center for technology and commerce. So Kamari Wright and Rachel John Kazungu jumped on an opportunity. They applied for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Emerging Leaders: U.S.-China Study Abroad Program and began their…
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Is the Rev. Jamal Bryant the Man to Save Baltimore?
The Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant is emotionally spent. The past 11 days had taken their toll when The Root spoke with Bryant, 43, over the phone Wednesday. We asked him how he was handling these “hectic” days—his home city of Baltimore mired in charges of police brutality, the suspicious death of Freddie Gray while in…
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Angry About the Riots? Then Be Angry About the State-Sanctioned Killing That Caused Them
When Baltimore police officers left 25-year-old Freddie Gray with an almost severed spine and a crushed throat, they became the straws that broke black America’s back. Many of us feel righteous anger as we reach out to one another across time and space, reaffirming not just our collective humanity but also our individual right to…