Looking for Plan B: An open letter to girls
To a 16-year-old girl who wants to buy Plan B-One over the counter: Someone in the Obama administration you’ve probably never even heard of made an unprecedented decision concerning you last week. U.S. Health and Human Services Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decided that Plan B One-Step, which you probably know as the “morning after pill,” [...]
Pick your paternalism poison
In his column, “America’s obsession with missing white women,” Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts asserts that the incessant news coverage of the latest young, pretty missing white woman is a “back-handed compliment” and the latest form of a “certain condescending paternalism” that casts white women as helpless damsels in need of rescue or of protection. I [...]
Baby do or baby don’t?
Story #1: Educated, career-oriented American women falsely assume they can easily conceive children when they’re in their 40s. Story #2: An unemployed, probably uneducated and possibly bipolar American woman easily conceives and bares 15 children with 3 different men and then demands that the state take care of them. I read, listened to [...]
Where the War on Drugs Meets the War on Women
“Planters care for nothing but to buy Negroes to raise cotton & raise cotton to buy Negroes.” –an unnamed southerner to northerner Edward Russell c. 1854 Dr. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, teaches civil rights advocates to be on the lookout for the next movement [...]
Rape is never funny
There’s a scene in “A Piece of Work,” a documentary about Joan Rivers, in which she makes a joke about Helen Keller. She basically says that Keller was the ideal child because she couldn’t talk. A man in the audience heckles Rivers. He yells that if you have a deaf son, that joke isn’t very [...]
Saluting women who work for peace
I published the column below in Velocity Weekly in 2009 after seeing the movie, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. The movie is about Liberian women who demanded an end to rape as a weapon in the civil war terrorizing their country. Earlier this week, Leymah Gbowee, one of the original organizers of the peaceful [...]
In the room with an activist
When Troy Davis was executed Tuesday night, I went to bed with a heavy heart and an equally burdened mind. I said what I could process that night via social media and awoke with the same feelings, but with the additional baggage of feeling bad for knowing I would go on about my day, as I [...]
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