At the start of the year, a group of 57 Native Americans students from the Lakota tribe were taken to a minor league hockey match in Rapid City, South Dakota to celebrate their academic achievements. But what started as a field trip to reward the students quickly turned into a nightmare, when a group of drunk men in an executive suite dumped beer on their heads and yelled “go back to the Rez!”

I was recently in Orlando, Florida, a few weeks after the brutal murder of nine African-American members of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for the annual Representative Assembly of the National Education Association (NEA), the union I am a retiree member of. Just 12 months earlier, the NEA, the nation’s largest labor union, made headlines when it elected three women of color to its executive leadership: President Lily Eskelsen Garcia, Vice President Becky Pringle and Treasurer Princess Moss. No other labor union in the United States could make that claim.

When the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse Friday morning, Gov. Nikki Haley spoke solemnly of the nine black churchgoers who were shot to death less than a month ago at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The tiny town of Whiteclay, Nebraska sits outside the Pine Ridge Reservation. Boasting a population of 12, it exists only to sell alcohol to members of the Oglala Lakota Tribe where alcohol is prohibited. Each morning, 20 or more Lakota members wait for one of the four liquor stores to open, most after spending the night intoxicated and sleeping in the streets. The town sells approximately 5 million cans of beer annually.