Wiley Day woke up to a near-electrocution late last month.

When I recently read about an Alabama teacher giving her eighth grade class a "racist math test," I had to laugh. This couldn't be for real. Do 13-year-olds even know how to quantify an eight-ball of cocaine? Perhaps this teacher was trying to "break bad" and was looking for the Jesse Pinkman to her Walter White. When I realized it wasn't a joke -- these kids actually had to complete and turn in this test -- my feelings morphed into anger. I wasn't mad at this one teacher, but at a world where we are constantly confronted by stories of hate.

It might have been expected that Alabama would be the first jurisdiction in this hemisphere in many years to imprison a journalist. This is the lot of Roger Shuler, blogger under the title "Legal Schnauser," which implies a self-image of a persistent, little dog, with a loud bark. Shuler is accused of taking liberties with the truth, but his self-image seems to be well accepted as exact. Shuler and his wife operate a left-wing blog from their home in Birmingham, Alabama, and although The New York Times has declared the Schnauser's allegations "fuzzily sourced," the Shulers get high marks for fearless assaults on their subjects.

Breast cancer mortality is 60 per cent higher for African American women ages 45-64 than for white women, even though African American women are less likely than white women to be diagnosed with the disease. So here we present to you the experiences of four African American women, all of whom are suffering from triple negative breast cancer. These are real photographs. These are real struggles.