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The Root and the Black Public Sphere

The Internet is a space where technological limits have been broken, yet race continues to shape the places and ways that people interact. Since 2008, TheRoot. com (hereby referred to as The Root) has occupied a unique and meaningful place within cyberspace by providing a venue for discourse on black communities. On The Root, black scholars, writers, and artisans engage larger black audiences in dialogue on matters facing the African diaspora, in many ways expanding the potential for a vibrant black public sphere. As a project founded by African American Studies professor Henry Louis-Gates, The Root has created a space for fast paced exchange between academics and the black public sphere. The role of the public sphere was first written about by Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and later critiqued by a range of scholars (Fraser 1990; HarrisLacewell 2004, Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). I draw from Catherine Squires’ (2002) working definition of black public sphere/spheres as an, ‘‘ . . . emergent collective composed of people who (a) engage in common discourses and negotiations of what it means to be Black, and (b) pursue particularly defined Black interests’’ (p. 454). I review The Root with an eye toward its potential to fulfill the continued pursuit of a thriving black public sphere. There has been considerable debate about the relevance or presence of viable black public sphere but these discussions have underconsidered sites like The Root as a new channel to establishing and expanding the black public sphere. The Root did not emerge out of thin air. In 2000, Henry Louis Gates founded the website www.africana.com which featured the tagline ‘‘Gateway to the Black World.’’ Africana.com was a unique online companion to the Africana (2005) that Gates coedited with Kwame Anthony Appiah. The emergence of Africana.com