The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Amazing rebel music from Matthew Grimm and the Red Smear. Best damned thing out of Iowa since sweet corn.

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In 1959, a white reporter named John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin and took a trip through the Deep South passing as a Black man. He underwent the kind of humiliation that any Black person would undergo in those times. The racism made him depressed and angry. The skin treatments made him nauseous. When he wrote the book Black Like Me to detail his experiences, he was hanged in effigy and received numerous death threats.

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When Bill Clinton became America's First Black President, he underwent no skin treatments. Instead he was awarded that honor by poet Toni Morrison in her now infamous 1998 essay. No one made him sit in the back of Air Force One. No one hanged him in effigy. He remained a beloved world figure.

People sometimes ask what  a coathanger has to do with reproductive justice. As a former history teacher, it only reinforces what I believe to be the great failure of my former profession. Despite our best efforts, and god knows a lot  of us worked at it pretty diligently, Americans really don't know much about their own history.

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In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the US Gulf Coast killing nearly 2000 people and flooding 80% of the City of New Orleans. Entire neighborhoods disappeared under water and many people were trapped on rooftops or in the New Orleans SuperDome for days.

The working class areas in and around New Orleans were the hardest hit, especially the 9th Ward which was largely Black. Today, nearly 3 years later, many people have not been able to return to their homes and the City of New Orleans is using the catastophe as an opportunity to gentrify the city, drive out thousands of its former citizens and insure huge profits for the real estate industry at the expense of the city's displaced residents.

The hurricane may have been a weather disaster, but the rebu­ilding of New Orleans is a human disaster of cold-blooded ethnic cleansing.

­It's been 40 years since 1968­ and already people are wondering how to remember it. Well, this is how I remember it and some of the years beyond.....

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 I heard the loud thumping of­ footsteps coming up the ­basement stairs of my parents' home in Silver Spring, Md. Something was very wrong. My girlfriend Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It's all over the news. Come downstairs. Now.

A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my
consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God's sake, not
him.

­On January 22, the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, NARAL Pro-Choice America is asking pro-choice bloggers to join them ­fo­r Blog for Choice Day!

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Blog for Choice Day provides us with an opportunity to raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere and the media, while celebrating Roe's 35th anniversary. Plus, it's a great way to let your readers and the mainstream media know that a woman's right to choose is a core progressive value that must be protected.

For more info, check out the Blog for Choice page. I'll be blogging that day. Will you?