Earlier this week, black and brown community organizers gathered on a conference call urgently convened in the wake of last weekend’s mass shootings. But they spent little time discussing El Paso and Dayton. While acknowledging the devastation gunmen had wrought on those places, they instead focused on the drumbeat of gunfire in some of America’s city neighborhoods, and on the people of color who live in them.
“For black and brown communities, when shootings happen, they’re not treated the same or covered the same,” said A.T. Mitchell, founder of the Brooklyn social services nonprofit ManUp, Inc., during one of the call’s more forceful moments. “We have to work twice as hard as our colleagues to get the kind of resources we need.”
