Is forty-eight years long enough to erase centuries of systemic disenfranchisement of voters who belong to minority ethnic or racial groups?

If you are an eighteen-year-old African-American from the South, you need only ask your grandfather what it was like to be educated in a segregated school. And if you are a Latino from Arizona, you should ask your abuelos if they recall the term…

After watching the president's State of the Union speech, I'm beginning to wonder how serious Latinos are about immigration reform. Surely for those who are out of status this is serious business, but the game seems less about fixing immigration and more about fixing to get over on the GOP. Latinos want solutions, not partisanship, but the immigration issue seems all too tempting for Democrats to capitalize on even at the expense of Latinos.

The private prison lobby, which gains profit off the misery of minorities and the poor, has emerged as one of the main influencers of tougher enforcement of immigration laws. And behind the prison lobby are minorities doing their bidding.

According to the ACLU, private prisons are responsible for approximately 6 percent of state prisoners, and 16 percent of federal prisoners. Today, almost half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are held in private prisons and the private prison industry has grown over 1,664 percent from 1990 to 2009.

Yosimar Reyes began to notice machismo when he was a young man being raised by his grandmother.

“I saw it was my grandma who was always doing everything,” he says. "She thought that was her role.”

Now, he challenges this kind of repressive masculinity in his poetry. “Everything that I write is celebrating masculinity without being in an oppressive form,” he says.

This year an estimated 1.6 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and more than 580,000 will die from it.

However, there is an even more alarming statistic.

Among Hispanics, cancer has now overtaken heart disease as the leading killer. This also includes a rise among kids with cancer.

"The number is rising and it is not going away, well as we are the Rio Grande Valley is primarily Hispanic and unfortunately we have continued to see the level of childhood cancer in Hispanics rise," says Victoria Guerra of the Vannie E.

I was in the middle of a study lounge when I leapt from my seat and stifled a cheer under the glare of fellow college students upon seeing an email saying the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) were considering allowing gay members.

This mustn’t be true. BSA was so adamantly opposed to repealing the law last July. Seeing people successfully change what seemed like a permanent policy is invigorating.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill into law today that grants hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants the right to drive. The new law makes Illinois the fourth state to allow driver's licenses or permits for undocumented immigrants and comes ahead of President Obama's  expected announcement on a plan for comprehensive immigration reform expected on Tuesday.

Quinn and the