DENVER -- Today marks the day Black women in the U.S. will finally earn as much as a white, non-Hispanic man was paid in 2020.

Ashley Panelli, associate state director of 9to5 Colorado, said gender and racial wage gaps deny women the money needed to own their own homes, help their kids get through college, and become financially stable.

She pointed to census data, which showed some women of color earn less than half their male counterparts' pay.

"When you have people making 50, 60, 70 cents on the dollar to their male counterparts, that added up over somebody's lifetime to hundreds of thousands, sometimes close to a million dollars, in lost wages," Panelli outlined.

Colorado's Equal Pay For Equal Work Act, which went into effect this year, aims to address the wage gap by requiring companies to include a salary range in any job posting.

Critics say the measure amounts to politicians micromanaging business, and warn companies could move to states with fewer regulations.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported some national companies have excluded job applicants from Colorado.

Panelli argued the report underscores the need for a national response to ensure wage transparency. Until then, she asserted it is important to put a spotlight on any bad corporate actors.

"Why is it that you are fearful to comply with this law? Because if you're implementing fair and just workplace policies, companies shouldn't have anything to hide," Panelli contended.

Panelli herself discovered during a candid conversation at a previous job a worker she supervised was making $15,000 more. She pointed out for too long, talking about how much money you earn has been a taboo subject, and she encouraged people to talk to coworkers and family members about salaries and the going rate for the kind of work they're doing.

"And bring that to their supervisors, bring that to their companies and really start this conversation," Panelli urged. "Because as long as there's a culture of silence around this, the gender wage gap will never change."

The arrests of 31 white supremacists outside of a Pride festival in North Idaho shook the country over the weekend. It's only part of a larger uptick in far-right extremism.

The group involved is known as Patriot Front, which renamed itself after the 2017 rally in Charlottesville where one of its members ran over and killed Heather Heyer. However, Patriot Front was not the only extremist group at the Coeur d'Alene Pride festival. Leah Sotille, a freelance reporter who covers this issue in the Northwest, said a local biker group and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, made the event a flashpoint.

"The Pride festival was going on, and then around the park there was a guy holding an AR-15, there were people holding signs and trying to intimidate people at the festival," Sotille said. "So, people seemed to respond to the Panhandle Patriots' and Heather Scott's calls to get people there to protest."

It's not yet clear what the Patriot Front members planned to do at the festival. Local police arrested them for conspiracy to riot.

Sotille said other far-right figures at the event included Matt Shea, a former eastern Washington state representative. Shea is known for his extremist rhetoric and has been seen with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader facing sedition charges for his role on Jan. 6, 2001, at the U.S. Capitol. Two people who attend Shea's church were among the men arrested.

Sotille said the latest attack on the LGBT community may feel new but it is not for folks like Shea.

"The whole debate around trans youth and trans people - this is something that has just revived old grievances within the far right," she said. "But I think it's just something that people like Matt Shea have pounced on to continue to push the views that they've always had."

Idaho has struggled with white supremacists in the past, although only one of the men arrested is from Idaho. Sotille said it's important to see this as one of many extremist incidents taking place within a short time span across the country.

"It was just a week ago or two weeks ago that we were all talking about the Buffalo shooting at the grocery store, and how the shooter was motivated by a white-supremacist ideology," she said. "This group, Patriot Front, is part and parcel, it's the same ideas about a white ethno-state."

Sotille has authored a book about religious extremism in Idaho, called "When the Moon Turns to Blood," which comes out next week.


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Nebraska did a better job counting the state's Latino residents in the 2020 Census than new national undercount data suggests.

According to analysis by the Brookings Institution, 5% of Latinos in the U.S. went uncounted in 2020, three times the undercount in the 2010 census.

Lissette Aliaga-Linares, assistant sociology professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, said she was not surprised by the high national undercount.

"Many of the Latino community don't trust public institutions," Aliaga-Linares pointed out. "People don't ask for help, even if their children are eligible for help, out of fear that will increase the threat of being deported."

Civil rights organizations had warned the Trump administration's hostile rhetoric toward immigrants -- including an effort to include a citizenship question on the census, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional -- would lead to a higher than average undercount.

According to the Urban Institute, Nebraska's undercount in 2020 is projected to be 3.6%.

The U.S. Constitution calls for a once-a-decade head count of everyone living in the United States, regardless of their immigration status. The stakes are high. Federal funding and political representation are determined by census numbers.

Aliaga-Linares noted volunteer civic engagement efforts across Nebraska were essential for getting a good count in the 2020 census, but the state still faces challenges going forward.

"There has been a lot of local initiatives for getting everybody counted," Aliaga-Linares acknowledged. "But if you don't have the support from the top, from the governor, from the state level, we will still face problems with undercounted minority populations here."

Latino leaders and advocates criticized Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts for failing to fund a state count committee, a commonly used tool for reaching historically hard-to-count communities. Many are now raising concerns about the fallout from the high national undercount over the next decade, which will impact funding for health care, public education, children's, veteran's, senior's programs, and more; along with political representation at the federal, state and local level.

President Joe Biden is using today's second anniversary of George Floyd's murder to sign executive orders on police reform. From criminal justice to business opportunities to diversity, Black leaders cite a mixed bag in advancing racial equity.

After Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, solidarity statements and pledges to take action came from a range of institutions. P.J. Hill, vice president of the Minneapolis NAACP, said there's been progress - but not enough follow-through to help Black businesses and smaller nonprofits navigate new investments and grants.

"There's so much red tape to go through that it makes people fatigued," he said, "and then the money is just too slow."

A recent milestone is the opening of Minnesota's first-ever Black-owned bank. But researchers suggest a long road ahead in reducing economic disparities. The Brookings Institution pegs the U.S. racial wealth gap at $10 trillion. Meanwhile, Biden's action received praise from civil-rights groups, but they have noted that the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act still awaits final approval in Congress.

Hill encouraged allies in the white community to keep looking inward - to reflect on their own unconscious bias and spark conversations within their networks. He said that urgency can't be allowed to dissipate in the days after a tragedy.

"What about after the news cycle? Continue to make that investment, continue to have that same fire, which is tough for us all to do," he said, "but I think it's going to take a concerted effort on all of our parts to really make the change that we would like to see."

In the Fargo-Moorhead area, Cani Aiden, who assists immigrant communities as community liaison officer at the Afro American Development Association, said the region expressed a supportive tone after Floyd's death. But he noted that hate crimes still cloud the issue, and a lack of diversity in local institutions is glaring.

"For example, the city that I live [in] now, when you see the employees, it's not totally diverse," he said. "I want to see diverse people, people working together."