On the horizon.

AS WE PUT THIS ISSUE TOGETHER, we've had a foot in both the past and the future. In the span of a week this summer, immigration reform fell apart in the Senate and the Supreme Court dealt a blow to school desegregation. All you need to do is scan the table of contents to see that, far from being irrelevant or incidental, racism is systemic and continues to shape our present reality: immigrant families living at the racetracks, often worse off than the horses they care for (page 32); Black children who still face too-high odds of being taken from their families, and either put into the foster care or the prison systems (pages 34, and 38).

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The past looms even larger in David Leonard and Richard King's examination of popular "ghetto parties" and other forms of racist play that have swept across a number of college campuses. Look on Facebook, and you'll be treated to party pics displaying white students covered in black body paint, wearing padded posteriors and fake pregnant bellies, and even donning KKK hoods.

It's no coincidence that racialized backlash is playing out in campus settings while political currents attempt to dismantle affirmative action and keep public schools locked in a spiral of segregation and inequity. As Professor Jared Sexton of UC Irvine says in "The Rise of the Ghetto-Fabulous Party," participants of racist play "rely on the dynamics of racial segregation that have produced the ghetto for the very form and substance of the most public and the most intimate aspects of their social lives."

Yet, despite these setbacks (and the depressing observation that colleges are producing future leaders who are "partying like its 1899"), the theme of this issue for me is really about looking ahead.

Ziba Kashef's cover story examines the wave of genetic discovery that's surging through the biotech industry, affecting everything from scientific debates about the nature of race to the search for miracle cures, perfect babies and personalized treatments for the affluent. Van Jones in his To the Point column writes about an imminent transformation of the U.S. economy, driven by mounting ecological crises. As Van puts it, "we are seeing a major debate ... about which communities of color apparently have nothing to say." It's not as if our communities don't have a lot at stake here. Most of the time, they are the front line for feeling the effects--whether it's as subjects of DNA research, egg harvesting and forensic profiling or for toxic dumping, pesticide spraying and other environmental disasters.

Why we keep seeing ourselves sidelined, across the board in so many issues, is due to what Van outlines as a combination of lack of exposure and access, white-dominated framing of the debate and structural impediments within communities of color.

Alongside the bitter lessons of school desegregation and immigration reform, these forward-looking debates underscore the point that we have to be able to grapple with the implications of issues and the ideas for solutions we want. Then, we have to develop the long-term vision and the planning so that when the time is right, as immigrant rights leader Alexia Salvatierra says, "we are in a position to get something better."

Tram Nguyen

Executive Editor