After reading Denise's BlogHer post last week that the gift of maternal health is the perfect Mother's Day gift, I thought "this really is perfect!" I blogged it and suggested that not only is it a great cause, but it is also a great consumerism/stuff-free gift, something that I feel, in our consumerism-driven society, is so important, but so ofte

Kelly Wickham of Mocha Momma recently commented on BlogHer that she'd like to see more people asking questions about the black experience so we could gain the same kind of learning we gained from discussing Dana Tuske's post on Israel. This was her comment:

I always want to yell at people, "GO GET SOME BLACK FRIENDS IF YOU HAVE ALL THESE QUESTIONS. DAMN." but I don't. If they didn't surround themselves in their hygenic-hermetically sealed bubbles and hope that everyone else can please explain themselves. I try to educate instead and sometimes, yes, I do so with a lot of sighing and a mild amount of disgust, but I know they really do want to learn.

I e-mailed Kelly, whom I've known and respected for a while now, to open a dialogue. Here are some excerpts from our conversation about the black and white of today's America.

The hot hot ladies of the Washington Redskins cheer squad are in India shaking their shapely hips in those short shorts, matching go-go boots and bikini tops. Needless to say male fans were left salivating for more, our culture guardians gasping at the "vulgarity", purists demanding that the "Indian" sport be spared of such cheap thrills, and some fence sitters (me included) wondering and analyzing to no end what this all means and if all this fuss is warranted.

Background:

Right now, there is a six-year waiting time and almost 900,000 applicants who are hoping to immigrate to Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has stated that if something isn't done soon, the backlog will soon increase to 1.5 million people waiting to enter Canada with an average wait time of 10 years.

"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."

--Dorothea Lange, American photographer, (1895-1965)

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, but some photographs can be worth just one heavy handful of potent words - words pregnant with meaning, set in bold with exclamation points and a severe emotional font, like Toxica.

My initial idea for a topic for today didn't originally have to do with women who chose to not have children. Originally, I was thinking about today's date. Although Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Rememberence Day) is officially on May 2, because it falls on Shabbat, it is being observed today in Israel. Thus I decided that it would be a good time to write about what women are doing to stop genocide around the world now. This is a very important issue to me as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors.