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The primary elections that set the stage for the 2008 US presidential elections constituted a “premi è re” in American history. Traditionally, party delegates end up choosing among “mainstream” European American male candidates. This time, the votes from the members of the Democratic Party were split between a woman, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and an African American man, Sen. Barack Obama, both representatives of minority groups in North American society, whether in power, in numbers, or both. Some 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little more than a century after the demonstrations of the Suffragettes, relations between the dominant group of European American men and other groups that comprise US society seem to have evolved, permitting events that were simply unimaginable a few decades earlier. As is well known, Sen. Obama eventually won the election over Sen. John McCain, becoming the first minority president in American history. This is but one example of a series of encouraging signs regarding the nature of the relations between groups in general, and minorities and majorities in particular. In addition to other prominent examples of minority members achieving stature and power, such as Kofi Annan as head of the United Nations (UN) or Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany, perhaps the most convincing piece of data concerns the steady improvement of indicators documenting sex and ethnic inequalities in United Nations statistics. Not all relations between groups, however, follow this reassuring path. Around the world, examples abound of the difficult, at times ferocious, relations …