After living here for two years, I’ve grown accustomed to life in Hawaii. My attorney is Japanese. The woman who rings up my eco-friendly Martha Stewart pans at K-Mart is Filipino. The baggers at Safeway are aging Hawaiian ladies, and the young woman who takes my order at Jamba Juice is “hapa haole,” or half-white.…

Let’s start from the beginning. The concept of catharsis has a powerful pre-Freudian connection to the sacred feminine. In 355 B.C., Aristotle developed the idea of collective purging in response to tragedy based on the medical term katamenia, which described reproductive fluids. Hundreds of years later, devotees of Mary Magdalene found inspiration in his idea…

After months of watching Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown, David Gergen and Jeffrey Toobin on CNN, after laughing and crying through many a Facebook chat with some of the smartest (and most fabulous) black and multiracial women in the world, after pouring my heart, mind and soul into blog posts on The Root, the Huffington Post…

There were several unforgettable moments in the Obama campaign—Barack’s impassioned speech about race, the DNC finale at Invesco, Madelyn Dunham’s death just before her grandson became president-elect—but none meant more to me than a two-minute bit of tape, a simple but monumental exchange between Michelle Obama and Soledad O’Brien. In her interview with Michelle, Soledad…