Two weeks ago, like many of you, I celebrated the election of the first person of color as President of the United States. Today, the possibilities seem endless.

People are questioning the wisdom of the free market. Americans are demanding a government that is transparent and accountable. They're responding to the message that real change starts and ends with all of us. We have the opportunity now to put forward our biggest ideas and move all of our institutions.

But there are huge challenges as well.

Read the rest of the article at the International Business Times. 

In case you missed Rinku Sen on last Friday’s Meet the Bloggers, watch it here.

At 8 A.M. on September 11, 40-year-old Fekkak Mamdouh was asleep, having worked the previous night's late shift from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. His wife, Fatima, lay beside him; she had dropped off their daughter at kindergarten four blocks away and then climbed back into bed. For six years, Mamdouh, whom everyone knew by his surname, had been a waiter at Windows on the World, the luxury restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower. He had started working there in 1996 when Windows reopened after the 1993 terrorist bombing in the World Trade Center basement. Mamdouh's wide brown eyes and the round apples of his cheeks gave him a disarming look of innocence. These mellow features hid the scrappiness that had made him a beloved, though sometimes controversial, union leader.

Read the rest of this article at AlterNet. 

"The positive fact is that I have noticed, confirmed… the fact that the U.S. society is confronting racism."

It's a statement that raised my brow. But that is what Doudou Diene, the United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia told NPR’s Weekend Edition host, Scott Simon on Sunday.

Diene, charged with preparing a report on the state of racism in the US, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Canada and twenty other countries, cited the Democratic nomination of Senator Barak Obama, a black man, as sign that people in the US are finally doing the "internal work" needed to fight racism. He called it "a deep process of transformation." And so it finally begins, I thought. Here is more fodder for pundits who consistently sweep racism under the rug.

Read the rest of this article at AlterNet.