The Oakland Press, 27 Jan 2013 – Dear Mr. President: Congratulations on your second inauguration. Let’s talk about drugs. As it happens, today’s festivities fell on Martin Luther King Day. This isn’t the first time you and Dr. King have encountered one another on the calendar. You first accepted your party’s nomination for the presidency on the 45th anniversary of his "I Have a Dream" speech. Though King is a hero for you, one suspects you find mild annoyance in that confluence of dates, given that it draws attention to that which you have assiduously ignored. Meaning, of course, race and the milestone your presidency represents.

Detroit Free Press, 09 Oct 2012 – Kemba Smith Pradia went to Tallahassee, Fla., last week to demand the right to vote. Back in the ’90s, when she was just Kemba Smith, she became a poster child for the excesses of the War on Drugs. Pradia, then a college student in Virginia, became involved with, and terrorized by, a man who choked and punched her. By the impenetrable logic of battered women, she thought it was her fault.