Millions of hard-working and responsible Americans risk being shut out of the opportunity to own their own home, with all that implies for building the wealth and assets that can help a family get through rough times and have something to pass along to their children.

It is time to put human rights at the center of the United States' domestic and international political agendas. Ratification of all international human rights treaties and protocols is essential, as is taking concrete steps to help the United States live up to its human rights obligations at home.

Those of us who are mere mortals have to take into account the consequences of our decisions. Not so for the U.S. Supreme Court.

A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world: 7.1 million adult residents -- one in 33 -- are under some form of correctional supervision including prison, jail, probation, or parole. Michelle Alexander writes in her bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more adult African Americans under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In 2011, our state and federal prison population exceeded that of the top 35 European nations combined. Something's very wrong with this picture.

How far have we come on the road from slavery to freedom isn't just a rhetorical question 150 years later. A people who don't know their history are more likely to repeat it. The resurgence of hate crimes and emergence of mass incarceration of males of color remind us that freedom requires constant vigilance and justice needs a fire that burns in all of us. I believe that we are in the second post Reconstruction era. Although some forms of continuing racial intolerance are overt, some forms are subtle, covert, technical, political, and very polite. Wrapped up in new euphemisms, better etiquette and clever political rhetoric, it's still, as Frederick Douglass warned, the same old snake. Let's call it out systematically, oppose it nonviolently, and move forward on becoming a free and just nation.

Last Tuesday, President Obama made a major speech to set the record straight on our nation's economy and what he called the most "defining issue of our time": restoring growth and prosperity for all Americans.

Many of us are still reeling from Congress's down-to-the-wire agreement on the debt ceiling that may have averted, at least temporarily, a catastrophi...

We are now officially witnessing the largest ethnic wealth disparity in decades. For those who claim we are in some sort of 'post-racial' society, I have news for you: we are anything but.