jason johnson
-
Tomi Lahren Can’t Fill a Room, The Root Hates Black Men, and Other Things I Learned at Politicon 2018
Genre conventions are all the rage in America. There is Walker Stalker Con for he Walking Dead, IDCon for true-crime Discovery Channel shows, and new comic book conventions pop up every weekend. Fan conventions are like clothing lines for celebritie —everybody thinks they’re a good idea and half of them don’t work (for every Rihanna…
-
Video of Me Was Used to Introduce Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference and I’m Pretty Sure I’m on a Watch List
I should cosplay as the characters from Undercover Brother or The Spook Who Sat by the Door. I have parachuted in to report at just about every single right-wing, alt-conservative confab you can think of over the last few years. Red State, the NRA convention and GOP conventions. If the Fox News, “Make America great…
-
The President of the United States Is a Terrorist Sympathizer. Now What?
On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s equivocation on the Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist rallies that plunged into violence and acts of terrorism forced America to accept an unmistakable, undeniable and utterly horrifying fact: Donald Trump, president of the United States, is a terrorist sympathizer. You can use whatever euphemisms you’d like—Trump is a terrorist supporter, Trump is…
-
Omarosa Made an Appearance at NABJ and That Shit Did Not Go Over Well
White House Negress token black woman director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault was added as a last-minute addition to a Friday panel discussing police brutality at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in New Orleans. Her announced appearance apparently created an uproar among black journalists attending the event. Page…
-
Counterpoint: Oh, C’mon! Spider-Man: Homecoming (and Its Diversity) Were Just Great, Jason
Jason Johnson, our political editor at The Root and an in-real-life close and personal friend of mine, wrote this last Friday about the new Spider-Man movie: Spider-Man: Homecoming is a fun movie, but not one that will stick with you for long. It’s significantly better on the diversity front than whitewashed Doctor Strange, or the…
-
On the Run 2017: Justin Fairfax Wins Democratic Primary for Lieutenant Governor of Va.
Justin Fairfax is one of only a handful of African Americans seeking statewide office in the 2017 election cycle, but after Tuesday’s primary, he’s managed to leap over his first major hurdle. Fairfax trounced his primary competitor Susan Platt 49 percent to 39 percent to secure the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia. It…
-
The Root’s Jason Johnson Called a Conservative Out for Whitesplaining Racism on MSNBC and It Got Heated
On Wednesday morning The Root’s political editor, Jason Johnson, appeared on MSNBC Live, as he often does, alongside Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union. Johnson is a veteran political analyst, writer and politics professor at Morgan State University. (Although I have no idea how he does all of this, because every time I turn…
-
How Umar Johnson Cured Me of Being a Hidden Hotep
I am a recovering hidden Hotep. Mind you, not the ankh-wearing, incense-selling, lecture-women-about-their menstrual-cycles kind of Hotep. I was more Hotep-adjacent. Hidden beneath my public-Ivy education and functional relationship with my parents lurked a man who would disappear down YouTube click holes of Tariq Nasheed, Professor Griff, ZaZa Ali and, of course, Dr. Umar Johnson.…