Filter By Sector
Jump to Person
The Root 100 is our annual list of the most influential African Americans, ages 25 to 45. It’s our way of honoring the innovators, the leaders, the public figures and the game changers whose work from the past year is breaking down barriers and paving the way for the next generation. This year’s list of honorees is a reminder of the beauty and brilliance of Blackness, at a time when the political and cultural landscape has grown even more hostile to the idea of Black achievement.Click here to learn more.
How did we arrive at the list? By using a unique algorithm, we calculate honorees’ REACH — the people they touch through media along with Twitter and Instagram followers — and their SUBSTANCE — the impact of their work, graded on a scale of 0 to 10 — to determine their INFLUENCE, which determines their ranking. Ultimately, we scored hundreds of people to determine The Root 100. Congratulations to this year’s honorees!
Explore the list in order or by sector:
95
David Dennis Jr.
Writer, cultural critic
Building on his Twitter fame, Dennis has been a leading and prolific writer on the race and culture-related news that has defined 2020.
Sector
Media
Age
34
Atlanta
152.3
6.6
7.7
32,055
Maybe you know him for his colorful sports commentary. Maybe you now know him as a writer of hilariously over-the-top Bossip headlines. In the pantheon of Black thought provokers and conversation starters, David Dennis Jr. has made sense of the omnipresent fray of the day with social criticism that sticks to our proverbial ribs. The year of carnage that is 2020 has given us an infinite supply of news items to call out, unpack and argue about, and the writer and Morehouse professor produced sagacious perspectives on race and culture for publications like The Undefeated and the Washington Post. In spite of the vitriol that flies at him from the far corners of the Twitter badlands, his writing has been a voice of levity on the disastrous administration, Drew Brees' tone-deaf political stances and how to survive intra-pandemic life in quarantine, making him a people's hero for being as honest as he is astute.
Visit: Facebook page.