culture

We know there’s endless diversity within the black experience and endless stories that are best told by the people who live them. For My Thing Is, a personal-essay franchise featuring members of The Root’s community, we want yours. Do you have a complicated identity or an unusual background? A fascinating career or an inspirational path…

Spider-Man is in prison, and while he has superhuman powers, he doesn’t have $3,500 to post bail. According to the New York Daily News, Junior Bishop, 25, who dresses up as the web-slinging superhero and panhandles photos with tourists in New York City’s Times Square, reportedly punched a cop, breaking his glasses. Bishop was charged…

A Canadian fertility clinic doesn’t want to create “rainbow families,” so it refuses to match clients with donors of different ethnicities, claiming that children should be able to easily identify their “ethnic roots.” A 38-year-old white woman named Catherine (she didn’t want to give her last name) told the Calgary Herald that she was looking…

It’s already been two years since May 2012, when we learned that for the first time, U.S. babies born to parents who didn’t identify as white outnumbered those born to parents who did. What this means, according to demographers, is that by the year 2030 or thereabout, there will be no majority racial group in…

The only thing I have grown to hate more than the term “having it all” is the debate about whether or not women can have it all. To be clear, I have been roped into this debate myself on more than one occasion, but I usually find myself doing what I just did: critiquing how pointless it…

Tired of her racist tirades, a neighbor struck back at a former Sarasota, Fla., school bus driver by sharing a video of one of her stunning outbursts on social media, according to a report at ABC affiliate WWSB. The video allegedly captures Pamela Michener spewing racial slurs at a neighbor. She retired from a job…

Health authorities worked quickly Saturday to contain the potential spread of the deadly Ebola after a man reportedly stricken with the virus boarded a plane from Liberia to Nigeria, the Associated Press reports. The incident raises fears that the man could have spread the highly contagious disease to other travelers aboard the plane, the report…

Eric Garner’s widow told a crowd Saturday that her husband was not “a violent man,” the Associated Press reports. Garner, 43, who was as big as or bigger than a professional football player in stature, “was not a violent man—in any way, shape or form,” Esaw Garner said in her first public remarks since her…

In a candid interview on the Today show, Arizona mom Shanesha Taylor said she left her sons alone in a car while she went on a nearby job interview in “a moment of desperation.” “It was me knowing my family was in crisis and knowing that I had to make a choice between providing for…

Steven Watiti was diagnosed with HIV in 1993. His wife was pregnant with their second child when she died of the disease, along with their baby. “That left me with my daughter who was 4,” said Watiti, a Ugandan physician. He spoke on a panel at the recent International AIDS Conference about people who have…