Politics
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Donald Trump May Not Be Our BFF, but He Is Brash Enough to Keep the Clintons Real on Race
In a recent New York Times profile of the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign, the presumptive Republican nominee for president made a curious claim: “By the way, I’m going to do great with the African-American vote. One poll came out saying Donald Trump’s going to get 25 percent of the African-American vote.” Fox News personalities…
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Red States Aren’t That Red for Trump, Thanks to Latinos
Donald Trump may be on his way to claiming the Republican presidential nomination, at least in part, by vowing to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the U.S., but many of those Mexicans may have quietly built a wall that will keep him out of the White House. That wall is emerging in…
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A Sanders-vs.-Trump Debate Is a Horrible Idea, Unless You Want Trump in the White House
In the entirety of American political history, there has never been a good idea that stemmed from a late-night talk show. Talk shows are for stupid pet tricks, evolution of dance segments and odd recurring characters. So the idea that a debate between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump was essentially passed like a junior high…
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Sister, Soldier, Voter: Tapping Into the Hidden Vote of the Black Military Woman
America should rethink the “American soldier” mythology during this year’s presidential election. The conventional wisdom, from politics to pop culture, that the military voter is white, male and Republican runs deep and false. A recent episode of HBO’s Veep showed a presidential election tipping Republican because of absentee ballots from a military town. Republican and…
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Trump’s Secret Plan to Win the Presidency: Pitting Minorities Against One Another
In this election, Donald Trump has used a grieving black father’s loss to try to pit black voters against Mexican immigrants. He employs black spokespeople to tell black voters that immigrants are taking their jobs. He tweets false crime statistics as a ploy to get black people to talk about “black-on-black” crime and distract from…
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Why Black Voters Are the Most Rational Voters of 2016
Let’s face it. Black voters are about the only folks in 2016 who haven’t lost their damn minds. Contrary to some nimble-minded pop-culture notions that either we’re not politically sharp or we don’t care about elections or we just vote for people who look like us, black voters (for the most part) are a rather…
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Yes, Bernie Sanders, the System Is Rigged—What Else Is New?
Bernie Sanders has no reason to be angry. He’s done more to raise his profile in the last 18 months than he’s done in over 30 years in the House and Senate. He’s managed to drag the Democratic Party left after years of centrist posturing by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He’s raised millions and…
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Scold-in-Chief? The Love-Hate Relationship Between HBCUs and President Obama
It’s complicated. That could be the official theme of President Barack Obama’s rapport with the African-American community in general, but even more so regarding his administration’s eight-year relationship with HBCUs, which we examine in this edition of The Root’s monthly series His Lasting Legacy. The expectations that came with the election of America’s first black president—combined…
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Racist Michelle Obama Cartoon Is Just Another Example of Conservatives’ Blatant Hypocrisy
Michelle Obama has been plagued by racist depictions since before her husband won the White House and throughout his presidency. There was the infamous cover of the New Yorker picturing the first lady as an Afro-haired, machine gun-toting militant in combat boots giving her husband a fist bump, also known as a “terrorist fist jab.”…