Culture

  • Meet the 'Faces of America': Mario Batali

    The Root’s editor-in-chief, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is launching a new PBS show that builds on the success of his African-American Lives, a series that traced the ancestry of famous black Americans. His new series, Faces of America, uses the same potent combination of traditional genealogical research and advanced DNA techniques to explore the…

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  • Meet the 'Faces of America': Stephen Colbert

    The Root’s editor-in-chief, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is launching a new PBS show that builds on the success of his African-American Lives, a series that traced the ancestry of famous black Americans. His new series, Faces of America, uses the same potent combination of traditional genealogical research and advanced DNA techniques to explore the…

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  • Meet the 'Faces of America'

    The Root’s editor-in-chief, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is launching a new PBS show that builds on the success of his African-American Lives, a series that traced the ancestry of famous black Americans. His new series, Faces of America, uses the same potent combination of traditional genealogical research and advanced DNA techniques to explore the…

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  • The Root Interview: Claude Steele on How Racial Stereotypes Harm Performance

    Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks to Columbia Provost and Professor of Psychology Claude Steele about de-fanging the “stereotype threat,” changing white colleagues’ attitudes and “hypnotizing” black people. Video provided by the Du Bois Review. The full interview can be seen on the site of the Du Bois Institute.

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  • The Root's 12 Days of Christmas

    Poet DJ Renegade breaks it down about those 12 days and what his true love really gave to him. On the black nationalist, spoken word, power-to-the-people, incense-burning tip.

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  • Mr. Obama's Sweet Potato Pie

    If it’s sweet potato pie that Barack Obama wants, then it is sweet potato pie that Barack Obama must have.

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  • Do the Right Thing @ 20: Spike Lee looks back

    In this extended version of their conversation, filmmaker Spike Lee and The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discuss the social and political meaning of the film, 20 years later.

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  • Spike Lee Speaks About 'Do the Right Thing' 20 Years later

    Spike Lee, in a conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root’s Editor-in-Chief, calls out the critics who predicted violence at the release of his groundbreaking 1989 film and clarifies what the “right thing” really was. ALSO: To read Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s thoughts on the movie and the director; find out why the Obama’s rarely…

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  • The Science of Racism

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