culture

  • Can Crowdfunding Finance Your Dream?

    Bill Duke, director of the highly acclaimed documentary Dark Girls, joins The Root Live: Bring It to the Table on Wednesday, Oct. 1, to talk about his experience with crowdfunding. The Root Live, sponsored by Prudential, is a weekly video series tackling financial concerns in the African-American community. Duke is joined in the discussion by Denmark…

  • NYPD Cop Charged in Drunken Assault of Woman After Breaking Into Her Home 

    A New York City police officer pleaded innocent on Monday to charges that he beat up a woman after breaking into her apartment while wearing only underwear, New York’s Daily News reports. Officer Eugene Donnelly was arraigned in Bronx Supreme Court for the June 10 incident. Donnelly—who, mere hours before the alleged incident, was awarded…

  • Thug Kitchen: A Recipe in Blackface

    When I first clicked through the recipes at Thug Kitchen, a tongue-in-cheek, vegan cooking blog served up with a heaping side of expletives, I imagined a calorie-conscious, gangly young black man who’s particularly vehement about clean eating, insistently tapping recipes into his blog while Dead Prez reverberates in the background. He has a good eye,…

  • Armed Intruder Made It Deep Inside the White House: Report

    Turns out that the man who jumped a White House fence armed with a knife and hatchet, and who was initially reported to have made it to the front door, actually made it as far as the White House’s East Room. According to NBC News, on Sept. 19 Omar J. Gonzalez hopped a fence, sprinted…

  • More Cops Required to Wear Body Cameras

    People who have been fed up the past several months with the string of incidents in which police officers have used excessive force against unarmed black men and women will be relieved to hear that at least a dozen police departments across the nation are beginning to equip their officers with video cameras, the New York Times reports. That’s right.…

  • More Africans Immigrated to the US in the 2000s Than Came by Slave Ship

    It’s sort of a weird benchmark to use to illustrate just how many sub-Saharan black Africans have immigrated to the United States over the past several years, but it’s impactful: According to a New York Times report, more black Africans moved to the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 than were brought to the North American continent by slave ship during…

  • We Need to Focus on Strategies for Building Generational Wealth

    During a recent Monopoly night with my husband, I was ahead, with lots of cash and some properties. But a few bad rolls of the die later, I found myself mortgaging my properties. I lost more equity at every turn despite the $200 in play money I had amassed. And then, to make matters worse,…

  • 13-Year-Old Boy Shot Dead in Chicago

    Another Chicago mom is left heartbroken after her 13-year-old son was found dead some four blocks from his home at Marquette Park, where he often chilled with friends, the Chicago Tribune reports. “Why? Why would they do this? It’s senseless,” Demureye Macon’s mother, Tawana Macon, said, according to the Tribune. “Quit doing this to these…

  • Pa. Family Sues Cops Who Charged Into Home to Take Cellphone

    Three Collingdale, Pa., police officers are facing a lawsuit accusing them of unlawful arrest, malicious prosecution, retaliatory arrest and unlawful search after barging into a home to confiscate a cellphone that was being used to record one officer’s aggressive questioning, NBC 10 reports. Michael and Kia Gaymon, 35 and 38 years old respectively, also included…

  • Ben Carson Likely to Run for President

    Ben Carson, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon-turned-Republican star, believes that the “likelihood is strong” that he will end up running for president in 2016. “Unless the American people indicate in November that they like big-government intervention in every part of their lives, I think the likelihood is strong,” he said Monday on radio’s The Hugh Hewitt Show,…