Do gun violence prevention groups have a race problem?
Nurah Abdulhaqq was 12 when she lost a family friend to gun violence – an experience that inspired her to make a change. After the student-led protests against gun violence in 2018 following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, she got involved as a violence prevention organizer. “I knew that I could lend a different perspective as someone who not only has lost someone close to me to gun violence, but who also lives in an area affected by the school-to-prison pipeline and poverty,” she said.
But instead she often found her viewpoint sidelined, especially in the large national-facing violence prevention groups she found herself interacting with, said the Atlanta-based activist, now 19.
“There was really not a discussion on Black and brown youth,” she said, or of the fact that gun violence has been the leading cause of death for Black male teenagers and young adults.
Abdulhaqq wasn’t alone. According to a new study from UCLA, young Black and Latino organizers commonly reported being marginalized in their work at large, national gun violence prevention groups over the past four years – including “being tokenized, silencing of racially conscious organizing and expectation to educate white peers on racism”.
These experiences were especially concerning, researchers found, since many young organizers started their work after the violent death of a loved one or peer. The findings echo the criticisms many large, national gun violence prevention groups – which are often run or were founded by white people in the aftermath of high-profile mass shootings – have faced in recent years for their lack of diversity.
“I think those things exist in all those rooms. Just because the movement started doesn’t mean America ends,” said RuQuan Brown, 21, an organizer and board member for March for Our Lives.
Some participants in the study said that these national organizations – which have millions of dollars in budgets and connections to legislators and news media – don’t meaningfully focus on the daily community gun violence that primarily affects low-income Black and Latino people, and instead focus their attention on high-profile mass shootings and school shootings. Others said that their insights into the root causes of community gun violence in Black and Latino neighborhoods weren’t included in their organizations’ national platforms.
The findings, which were presented at the annual Society for Social Work and Research conference in January and are now being peer-reviewed, are based on interviews with 22 young Black and Latino violence prevention advocates who have worked with national-facing gun violence prevention organizations.
Trevon Bosley, a 24-year-old organizer based in Chicago, said that Black and Latino organizers being overlooked or outright ignored is indicative of broader inequalities in the levels of attention and compassion certain victims of gun violence receive. “We are just a tally mark in the newspaper,” he said. “When these mass shootings happen, you see the faces.”
Bosley has long been involved in local violence prevention. In 2005, when he was seven, his cousin was shot and killed; the next year, his older brother was gunned down. Bosley said that organizing became his outlet. “After having these losses I had a lot of anger, and to use that to do something positive was the right thing. That’s what my brother would want,” he said.
As his profile and experience as a local organizer grew, Bosley began working with the local chapter of larger groups that were focused on stopping mass shootings. He quickly found that many of his new suburban peers weren’t interested in sharing resources and mutual support with people in his neighborhood. “They wanted to use it for résumé building,” he said.
Many of the incidents described to the Guardian and included in the study occurred between 2018 and 2022, but the situation has improved since then, young organizers say. Several national gun violence prevention groups have recently expanded their missions to tackle the community violence that disproportionately affects Black and Latino teens and young adults, the organizers said, a process that was accelerated by the mass demonstrations against racism and police violence after the murder of George Floyd.
For example, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence created the Center for Violence Intervention to specifically support on-the-ground violence prevention groups that serve Black and Latino neighborhoods. Moms Demand Action, a group founded after the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, has formed partnerships with and fundraised for community-based violence prevention groups that operate in under-resourced Black and Latino communities.
We do better when we include many voices. It’s an ecosystem and we have to make sure it’s all hands on deck
Angela Ferrell-Zabala of Moms Demand Action
“The unpacking of all these things is taking time,” said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, about diversity and inclusion in national violence prevention organizing. “We do better when we include many voices. It’s an ecosystem and we have to make sure it’s all hands on deck.”
And March for Our Lives started a mutual aid fund for organizations that are led by Black and Latino people. According to Mariah Cooley, co-chair for the national board of directors for the group, new leadership in the ranks has helped shift priorities toward supporting communities hardest hit by violence.
“There’s been a lot of evolution, the leadership has changed so vastly. For these big groups, it’s not about bringing [community-based groups] to the table, you need to go to them and go through a day in their lives, meeting them where they are,” Cooley, 21, said.
Brown said that from his perspective as an activist, “organizations have to be flexible and willing to accept this refocusing on priorities and distributing care equally, equitably.”
In 2017, one of Brown’s football teammates was killed, and the next year so was his stepfather. Following their deaths, he began speaking out against gun violence in his hometown of Washington DC and creating T-shirts and stickers that said “LOVE 1” in honor of the number his former teammate wore on his jersey. Since then, he’s visited the White House alongside other Gen Z gun violence prevention activists, and is now an undergraduate at Harvard.
“It’s a beautiful opportunity, but simultaneously, it’s so important to keep your mind, your heart with the people who ain’t at the [big] events,” Brown said.