I didn’t know any victims of gun violence myself, but I did know that more than 30,000 Americans are killed every year by guns. After seeing my city recently come together so passionately to mourn the three people killed in the Marathon bombing that Monday, I couldn’t help but wonder why more people – especially the senators who voted against universal background checks – weren’t equally affected by these other 30,000 unnecessary deaths. 

For months, hundreds of community members and advocates participated in workshops throughout California to figure out how to spend millions generated through the state’s cap-and-trade program. Just when the groups finally hammered out an investment plan that would start to pump money back to communities, Gov. Brown proposed Tuesday to divert that money to the general fund.

Whites had an average wealth of $632,000 in 2010 while Blacks had about $98,000 and Hispanics had $110,000, according to a recent study by the Urban Institute. “Such great wealth disparities help explain why many middle-income Blacks and Hispanics haven’t seen much improvement in their relative economic status and, in fact, are at greater risk of sliding backwards,” the report says.

The study also highlighted the issue of immigrant parents who resisted interracial or religious relationships. “It’s not ok for me to marry outside of my religion—I have to marry a Muslim. My parents would prefer someone Arabic because the culture is the same,” a Yemeni female participant said. In conversations and a survey with young San Gabriel Valley residents with immigrant parents, I also heard many youth say that they were up against stiff parental restrictions on dating, uncomfortable conversations, and resistance to marrying outside of their racial or ethnic group.

During one hunger strike in 2006 the prison commander assigned me to a special block to take care of prisoners he said were coming out of the hospital. But they were actually coming from isolation blocks that were kept ice cold. Each prisoner was shaking, each prisoner had a bruised nose with dried blood and black ringed eyes that were petrified. Everyone complained of gut-wrenching pain and bleeding hemorrhoids. 

As Congress begins to discuss immigration reform, immigrant rights groups, DREAMers and their supporters marched in many U.S. cities, begging the question: Do these marches help achieve the goal of legislation beneficial to immigrants or are they counterproductive? "It is ironic that we are asking this question today, May 1, which commemorates an 1886 march of the emerging labor movement in Chicago demanding an eight-hour work day. That march was attacked by police, its leaders were eventually executed, and it was quashed immediately.