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 ...