Noliwe Rooks

We are setting up for our open house tomorrow @ 4:30. You KNOW this will good. Student performances, raffles, sugar!!!

Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown invites you to a coffee conversation about the development of AI technology Topics include: the development of AI and America’s racial caste system; digital blackface; technology and inequality; how might users respond?

Oh and this, from @nrooks.bsky.social about the profitability of segregation thenewpress.org/books/cuttin...

I had the most engaging conversation with Gene Demby host of @nprcodeswitch Switch today about our kids, our hopes for their education, and the complicated landscape we are navigating right now. riverside.com/shared/snaps...

Yes! I understand much of the history and why things are the way they are. Small districts, no political will to consolidate. But what’s frustrating is our district could be a model of what is possible. But the implementation has been so messy, & the local politics so contentious & so…

Just when I decided the whole Nor’easter thing was an overhype here in PVD, the skies have opened and the wind is gusting.

This is worth the listen. It was taped before the recent article. The takeaway for me is that individual effort, no matter how sincere, well argued, furious in its assault, will rarely change the system before the system changes you and those you love. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

www.linkedin.com/pulse/anothe... The woman who buys human hair is not the enemy of the woman who sold it. The two are connected by an industry that needs both of them and fully protects neither. One woman's body is in the marketplace so another can move through her own world with less friction.

How did synthetic hair become such a central part of Black beauty culture? Who built the industry? If you were to start digging into this question, you would keep returning to two names: Christina Jenkins and Naomi Sims. www.linkedin.com/pulse/black-...

Before discrimination appears in policy, it appears in habits. Before inequality is enforced by institutions, it is practiced through everyday rituals that teach people what feels normal and what does not. Hair has long been one of those rituals. www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-b...

Knicks!

Residents of Monterey Park, California, decisively approved the nation’s first permanent ban on data centers in Tuesday’s election, with more than 86 percent of voters supporting the prohibition, according to data.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler shook down German industrialists for millions of Reichsmark to establish what he called the Adolf-Hitler-Spende der deutschen Wirtschaft—a slush fund he used to pay off Nazis whose violence got them into legal trouble. In 2026, Donald Trump is quietly doing the same thing.

Women spend much of our lives receiving messages about aging. We are encouraged to fight it, conceal it, slow it down, and disguise its visible signs. Entire industries depend on our willingness to believe that aging is a problem requiring intervention.

Black hair has always functioned as a cultural text, encoding economic aspiration and spiritual practice, generational memory and political positioning. It moves through entertainment and into the market and back into the community, carrying meaning at every stop. www.linkedin.com/pulse/hair-c...

Starved of cash, the U.N. has made historically large spending cuts and embarked on an efficiency drive. It has closed offices and eliminated a record 3,000 secretariat posts. It has powered down escalators and ignored loose cladding on its 75-year-old headquarters in NY. www.wsj.com/world/the-u-...

Hurston saw adornment as artistry. Modern America often interprets the same impulse as failed discipline. That distinction matters because the policing of Black style has never been merely aesthetic. It is also about regulating who gets to occupy public space comfortably and under what conditions.

Fonseca came to play against Djokovic today. Fifth set upcoming. He is 19. His legs and nerves seem to be steady!!

Djokovic, Fonseca has turned into a great match.

Academia is organized around ways of knowing. Popular and mass culture, and shaping cultural appetites are not so much engaged except in “studies” fields. Scholars in there understand exactly why this matters in a four alarm fire, this is not a drill, speak or forever hold your peace, kind of way.

When most people think about fascism, they think about governments, leaders, and state violence. They think about censorship and repression. Those elements matter, but they are not where authoritarian projects begin. They begin with stories about belonging.

When most people think about fascism, they think about governments, leaders, and state violence. They think about censorship and repression. Those elements matter, but they are not where authoritarian projects begin. They begin with stories about belonging.

Dear cash-strapped universities, please see below and budget accordingly: “corporate leaders are scrambling to bring down expenses by finding ways to ration AI use in their organizations, steer workers toward cheaper, homegrown tools and help them hone their skills to improve returns. “

Beginning in 1958, Eunice Johnson built a traveling couture spectacle featuring Black models, audiences, and designers moving through 200 cities across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Black were worthy of glamour. www.linkedin.com/posts/noliwe...

I’m honestly not sure these young people are listening to the NAACP about where they should go to school. Or is the organization more impactful for them than I understand?

This part of summer is so good for watching sports. Tennis and basketball are very good right now.

My Bethune book is out in paperback. I am so very proud of it!

My Bethune book is out in paperback. I am so very proud of it!

I mean the whole thing is a destructive scam that’s fun to play with and streamlines tasks. It’s hardly the holy grail!

Talarico: I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. And if all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.

Folks steady regret it when they fail to understand what mass and popular culture tells us about politics.

A network of fake academic journals masquerading as legitimate publications has published more than a hundred AI-generated papers in recent months, in some cases using the names of real professors at top universities without their knowledge.

Just tone deaf and why in the midst of the decline of democracy so many are still uninspired by corporate Dems.

Watching the new PBS documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause, I kept thinking not only about Du Bois’s politics but about Black fashion at the turn of the twentieth century. Black freedom struggles were never only legislative. They were also aesthetic. www.linkedin.com/pulse/du-boi...

And now they are all gone. RIP Sonny Rollins.