Noliwe Rooks
@nrooks.bsky.social
Chair and Professor, Brown University, Africana Studies. Author of Integrated: How Schools in America Failed Black Children, available 3/18/25 and A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune.
It’s terrible. It’s also not a great time for humanities PhD students. I’m really worried about ours at UT. Our entire grad school got reorged. It used to be standalone with a dean. Now it reports to a senior Vice provost, is effectively under the Provost’s authority.
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.
Another Woman’s Hair
After writing about Christina Jenkins, Naomi Sims as the Black women who helped invent the modern synthetic hair market, I found myself thinking synthetic hair was never only fake hair. At its best, i...
linkedin.com
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-...
The Black Women Who Invented the Synthetic Hair Industry
I have been writing about Black women and beauty for 30 yearsl. Over that time I have researched beauty shops, beauty schools, hair politics, respectability, integration, entrepreneurship, and the com...
linkedin.com
For generations, Black Americans have lived with the consequences of a society that treats appearance as a proxy for character. Sometimes the target was a zoot suit. Sometimes it was a hoodie. Sometimes it was dreadlocks, braids, cornrows, or natural hair. www.linkedin.com/pulse/fashio...
When Fashion is the Crime
Last fall, I taught a course on the cultural history of cannabis legalization. As I researched the class, I found myself unexpectedly immersed in the history of fashion.
linkedin.com
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...
What Black Hair Reveals About Politics
Years ago, I taught a course called Negro to Black: The Aesthetics of Racial Integration. The title often confused students.
linkedin.com
For generations, Black women have had to fight human beauty standards that treated our hair, skin, noses, lips, bodies, age, and features as problems to solve. Now those standards are being encoded into machines.. www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-a...
When AI Decides What Black Beauty Is
A few years ago, National Geographic ran a piece on the science of beauty that returned to an old and unsettling claim. The beautiful face, researchers argued, is often a symmetrical face.
linkedin.com
Every year around Juneteenth, I think about how Black communities survived in the years after emancipation. Freedom and survival are not the same thing. Emancipation ended slavery, but it did not provide safety. www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty...
Beauty, Juneteenth and the Black Women Who Built the Infrastructure of Survival
Every Juneteenth, some Americans celebrate freedom. This year, as stories about voting rights, democratic backsliding, attacks on higher education, and the erosion of civil rights protections fill the...
linkedin.com
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.
Voters back first-in-nation permanent data center ban in city near L.A.
The ban on computer warehouses in Monterey Park won overwhelming approval as the tech industry struggles against pushback across the country.
washingtonpost.com
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.
Obscure Group With Trump Ties Plans to Route Funds to His Allies for Legal Fights
nytimes.com
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.
The Hardest Transition. Going Gray.
The hardest part of going gray was learning that other people saw me differently.That surprised me.
linkedin.com
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...
Hair is a Cultural Text: Just Ask Jay-Z
This past weekend, Jay-Z walked out onto the Belmont Plateau stage at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia and the internet lost its mind. Not just over the freestyle he dropped or the apparent shots at D...
linkedin.com
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-...
The U.N. Is Going Broke as the U.S. and China Withhold Billions
The Trump administration has failed to pay billions of dollars owed to the international body, while Beijing has been accused of gaming the budget.
wsj.com
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.
Zora Neale Hurston understood something about Black style that America still struggles to accept
In her 1934 essay “The Will to Adorn,” Zora Neale Hurston argued that adornment was not superficial decoration, but a deeply human impulse toward beauty, invention, display, and self-making. She descr...
linkedin.com
"The photographs from Osaka's dinner offered a glimpse of belonging. What they did not offer was a ranking system. The difference matters. One creates community. The other creates a world in which people are valued according to how closely they resemble an ideal."
Noliwe Rooks@nrooks.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhen 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.
Fonseca came to play against Djokovic today. Fifth set upcoming. He is 19. His legs and nerves seem to be steady!!
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.
“The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. Its job, officially, is to redesign how Americans experience their government. Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, which is to say he is a man who looked at the American home and saw an untapped revenue stream.”
I found a second vote.gov — and it's registered to the White House
There is a moment in every investigation where the thing you have been looking for finds you instead.
thedreydossier.substack.com
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.
The Fashion of Fascism
At this year's French Open, Naomi Osaka's outfits have generated almost as much discussion as her tennis. Sportswriters have described them in detail.
linkedin.com
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.
The Fashion of Fascism
At this year's French Open, Naomi Osaka's outfits have generated almost as much discussion as her tennis. Sportswriters have described them in detail.
linkedin.com
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. “
Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets
Executives are scrambling to track returns on AI investments as the bill for massive computing needs comes due.
wsj.com
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...
Eunice Johnson, Fashion Fair and the Fabric of Black Beauty Culture | Noliwe Rooks
Eunice Johnson Built a World So Rhianna and Beyonce Didn't Have To
linkedin.com
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.