I, for one, am very happy that you are celebrating your achievement. Your blog is the time and place to do so and I am celebrating with you. Even more importantly, many of the insights that you put forth in the voting rights piece are invisiblized by other news and research sources. People truly committed to learning about disenfranchisement and advocating against it often have few options beyond the mainstream news sources and the sometimes equally as mainstream and risk-adverse spheres of academe.

In other words, your In These Times article truly did have lasting value because you focused on a specific problem that embodies the AFTERMATH of the disenfranchisement borne of Katrina.

I thought of your writing this week while watching parts of Spike Lee’s documentary on Katrina.

The documentary is quite good and I take nothing away from Mr. Lee’s achievement. I was, however, saddened about the missing stories (or expanded stories) of Mississippian (and not just Louisianian) devastation, real estate abuses, and voting rights disenfranchisement. While the documentary touched on these things, it did not go nearly as incisively into these issues as your work does. It made me feel blessed to have read your work in conjunction with seeing the documentary.

So, please do keeping bragging sometimes: how else are we to know what to celebrate?