culture

(The Root) — I had just gotten in from cheerleading practice when I got the call. On the other end, a chipper girl I’d met for the first time the night before gave me the good news: The sisters of Delta Gamma wanted me to be one of them. I’d made it past the first…

The number of African-American children adopted by foreign parents who live outside the United States is steadily rising, according to a CNN report. For some birth mothers, part of the appeal is that their child will get the opportunity to grow up in an exotic overseas location. And for others, there is the perception that…

UPDATED Tuesday, Sept. 17, 10:17 a.m. EDT: According to the New York Times, Aaron Alexis, a black 34-year-old former Navy reservist, was the lone gunman who killed at least 12 people in a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday. Law-enforcement officials are trying to piece together what motivated Alexis, now dead. Navy…

One of the more shocking things revealed in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s scandal, in which the Chicago politician was found guilty of illegally spending campaign funds on superfluous items, was his taste in clothing. Jackson had a penchant for mink capes, as if he were trying to bring back the 1970s. As Halloween fast approaches, those…

When The Arsenio Hall Show made its comeback to late-night television last week, almost 20 years had passed since it was on the air. But one look at the show’s first-week numbers, as provided by Shadow and Act via a press release, and it looks as though Hall was missed by a lot of people. “The…

(The Root) — This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.  A young black woman stands in a delicately swaying posture, holding a large lidded…

(The Root) — Last month, Southern rapper and Academy Award winner Juicy J announced via Twitter that he was offering a $50,000 scholarship to “the best chick who can twerk.” It was a marketing strategy to gain interest in “Scholarship” — a song off his latest album, Stay Trippy — and no doubt an opportunity…

(The Root) — On Thursday, Sept. 12, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University convened a National Dialogue on Race Day. The standing-room-only event attracted upwards of 400 people to discuss racial justice and equality in America 50 years after the March on Washington. The struggle for racial justice necessitates…

Michaela Angela Davis, in a piece at CNN, lays out the very distinct receptions that two African-American hairstyles — the Afro of Dante de Blasio, the son of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio; and the dreadlocks of Tiana Parker, a little girl in Tulsa, Okla. — received in recent weeks, from the…