culture
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That Time I Staged a 1-Man Die-In, or … Why I’m Banned From the Apple Store
I was chatting with Deputy Managing Editor Yesha Callahan on Monday about suffering through a terrible tragedy this weekend in which I cracked my iPhone screen. While telling her about my experience trekking through the holiday shopping crowd to the Apple Store, she assaulted me with a demeaning joke. “There’s an Apple Store in Alabama?”…
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The Charter School Movement Is Complicit With Segregation
Charter schools didn’t create segregation, but the charter school movement isn’t helping to end it, either. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must never adjust ourselves to racial segregation,” he wasn’t suggesting that black kids need white kids and white teachers in the classroom with them to learn. King was acutely aware that segregation…
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K. Michelle’s New Album Is Basically The Shade Room: The Musical
K. Michelle’s latest album, Kimberly: The People I Used to Know, is more or less an hourlong, multigenre “Fuck you” to various folks who have pissed her off for varied reasons through the years. The frame of mind she entered or at least settled on for her fourth studio effort is laid bare in the…
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Snow Ain’t the Only Thing White During Christmas, so I Give You the Top 10 Blackest Holiday TV Shows and Movies
My son Quinn loves Christmas. Like—he loves it in a watch-How the Grinch Stole Christmas-on-the-Fourth of July kind of way. Every year he bombards me with endless Christmas movies and TV specials during the month of December, and that experience has taught me one thing: Snow and eggnog aren’t the only things white during the…
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Is He Playing With Your Emotions and Wasting Your Time?
Sometimes we want someone so badly, we overlook all the warning signs and red flags that should send us running in the opposite direction. Other times, we are already waist-deep in emotions and feelings before we realize that the dude has no intentions toward us, accepts no accountability for his actions and is really just…
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Raise Your Hand if You Smoke Weed!
While on vacation in California recently, I smoked weed in front of my mom for the first time. Scratch that. I didn’t smoke weed in front of her. What I actually did was whip out a joint and tell her I was going to smoke it in her bathroom, where she regularly smokes her cigarettes…
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Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones Has Nothing to Do With Little Girls; It’s About White Supremacy
When die-hard Republicans engage in the often fruitless exercise of soliciting black and other minority voters to buck the stranglehold of the Democratic voting bloc and join the constantly shrinking tent of the Grand Old Party, they always resort to the same tactics. They declare themselves “the party of Lincoln” and mention how they ended…
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Nominate the Leaders of Tomorrow for The Root’s Young Futurists
Who are the young, outspoken activists standing up for their communities and calling out injustice? Who are the young, creative artists and entertainers who will tell our stories and represent us in the worlds of music, film, television, books and theater? Who are the young, business-savvy entrepreneurs who are not just looking for a job…
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Taxicab Confessions: On Being Friendly When You Can’t Be Bothered
The new World Trade Center in all its grotesque, sanitized and bleached whiteness still makes me a bit sick. I remember the towers before the planes hit; I remember the smoke and grief that wafted into Brooklyn after they fell. So this new whale carcass filled with high-end stores and corny tourist attractions turns my…
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Fear of the State, Fear of My Home: To Be Black and Queer in America
“I was called a faggot before I was ever called a nigger.” I’ve heard this statement from LGBTQ people hundreds of times across social media platforms, drawing various reactions from both hetero and homosexual communities alike. For many of us, this statement, albeit true, often lacks the full context and explanation of how both offensive…