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2020-

2020-07-10 d
Dark Times for the Melanin Minorities

Gun violence is surging in cities, and hitting communities of color hardest

Communities of color have endured the weight of COVID-19, the recession and social unrest. They’re also bearing the brunt of a surge in gun violence.

For many major U.S. cities, this year has been marked by bullets and bloodshed.

Over 1,500 people have been shot in Chicago, almost 900 in Philadelphia, and more than 500 in New York City so far in 2020 — all up significantly from the same time last year (1,018 in Chicago, 701 in Philadelphia and 355 in New York).

The surge in shootings has been particularly painful for communities of color, which have disproportionately endured the weight of the COVID-19 crisis, the economic recession and social unrest following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May.

In New York City, after the number of shooting victims more than doubled from June 2019 to this June, every person who has been shot this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community, according to the police department. And in June, 97 percent of the shooting victims were minorities, the department said.

In Chicago, where minority communities have long struggled with deadly gun violence, shootings have increased 76 percent from the same time last year, with nearly all the bloodshed concentrated in the city’s predominantly Black and brown communities on the South and West Sides.
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“The Black community lives in a state of trauma when you look at all the maladies that adversely impact them,” he said. “These communities are the most vulnerable in our society, so a lot of these social and societal ills are going to manifest there earlier and more prominently.”

Atlanta had a 20 percent spike in shootings from the same time in 2019, with one of the youngest victims being an 8-year-old girl, Secoriea Turner, who was shot while riding in a car with her mother over Fourth of July weekend. …

“If they don’t kill us,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “we’re going to kill one another. It’s sad.” (read more)

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