culture

(The Root) — These days, Deandre Poole spends more time than he’d like at home, staring at a computer screen, grading assignments and answering student questions for a communications course at Florida Atlantic University. “Teaching online is a new experience,” he told me Friday, on the phone from his home in South Florida. “It’s very…

Danielle T. Pointdujour writes at Ebony magazine about a woman who is having a baby with a man who happens to be her gay male BFF. The concept of “family” mystified me in my youth. Although people always talk of traditional families, it always seemed to me that there were slight variations on what “normal”…

In a poignant piece for Salon magazine, New Orleans teacher Kate Selker wonders whether racial profiling led to the shooting of one of her students. Police say that Marshall Coulter was shot in the head by neighbor Merritt Landry — who’s been charged with attempted second-degree murder — while climbing Landry’s fence. A few months…

In a piece for the Feminist Wire, Rabi’a Hakima argues that despite Don Lemon’s comments, women raising children alone have value and aren’t the root cause of high rates of incarceration or poverty within the black community. She also says that Lemon’s comments perpetuate Eurocentric racism and come from a place of male privilege. The…

Anthony Stokes, a 15-year-old boy who has been denied a heart transplant by an Atlanta hospital, supposedly because of “noncompliance,” has gained new support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, according to CBS Atlanta. Controversy has revolved around Anthony’s case because Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has been vague about the reasons he’s not eligible for…

Last week the Alabama Constitution Revision Commission voted in favor of a proposal to revise the language in a section of their state’s constitution allowing separate schools between black and white students. The state constitution has been under close examination for revisions since 2011, and amendments to the article about segregated schools — Section 256…

(The Root) — The instructions, relayed by an editor on a Friday afternoon, detonated like a bomb over the telephone: “I don’t think a black person should write the review for this book.” The book in question looked at legal cases during the civil rights era; the black person being considered to review it was…

(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.One of the chief treasures of the National Museum of the Middle Ages, or the Musée de Cluny, in Paris…

(The Root) — Sometime last week, a poll was released by Reuters/Ipsos that found 40 percent of white Americans had no friends of color and 25 percent of people of color had no friends of a different race. Covering a broader circle of acquaintances to include co-workers as well as friends and relatives, the poll…