The mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando over the weekend was a horrific tragedy, ending the lives of 49 people, many of whom were Latino as well as openly LGBTQ.

Ninety percent of the 49 people killed were Latino or of Latino descent; specifically 23 victims were Puerto Rican, according to the New York Times.

Yet when it came time for politicians to extend their "thoughts and prayers" to the victims, many of them — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan — glossed over the fact that the victims were part of these marginalized groups. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) argued, "It was a young person’s nightclub, I’m told. And there were some [LGBTQ people] there, but it was mostly Latinos," as though LGBTQ people could not also be Latino.

But the Times also reported that LGBTQ people are the most likely group to be attacked, when compared individually with racial and religious groups. Overall, one-fifth of hate crimes tracked by the FBI are carried out on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Half of all hate crimes are due to race (with all races combined). Multiple-bias incidents, though, are mentioned in the report at less than 1 percent and not broken down much further.

It's this heightened vulnerability to violence — both racially and based on sexual orientation and gender identity — that makes it all the more important to avoid whitewashing the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. It’s also key to remember that many people of color are, in fact, LGBTQ, even if the data used to track such violence often misses this point.

Ignoring this only continues a vicious cycle: Even with evolving visibility of LGBTQ people on the whole, "LGBTQ" still translates to many people as white, gay, and male. Perhaps that’s because many of the organizations and media centered on LGBTQ people for so long have been run by and focused on white gay men. And because of that, the unique needs of LGBTQ people of color are then ignored, which continues a disproportionate cycle of targeted violence.

"Being bisexual, lesbian, gay, or sexually queer in a heterosexist society means you'll be subject of heterosexist violence," H. Sharif "Herukhuti" Williams, PhD, told Vox. "Being female, feminist, transgender, or genderqueer means you'll be the subject of sexist, misogynist, or patriarchal violence. Being a person of color means you'll be the subject of white supremacist violence. Being two or more of those things compounds the violence you experience and the reasons you're experiencing it. It also makes it more difficult to feel some semblance of safety because you could be targeted for one of those identities in a space that is set up to be safe for people with [an]other one of those identities."

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs keeps tabs on reports of violence against LGBTQ people in 12 states. Last year, 62 percent of the LGBTQ homicide victims it tracked were people of color — 50 percent were black, 13 percent were Latino, and 9 percent were white. These figures are, of course, disproportionate with the general US population.

Furthermore, transgender and gender nonconforming people were also disproportionately targeted, with transgender black women at the highest risk of homicide, according to the Times’s three-year survey of the NCAVP’s figures.

Among survivors of violence, the NCAVP reported 60 percent overall were people of color (Latinos at 29 percent, blacks at 21 percent) and 39 percent white.

Actor Wilson Cruz, a spokesperson for GLAAD who is also Puerto Rican, lost a family member in Sunday’s massacre.

"Not only is this a story about a minority group being attacked but it’s a minority within a minority that was attacked," Cruz told the Huffington Post. "Naming those names and where they’re from and the struggle that they were living daily as LGBT Latinos is part of the story and not naming it, to me, feels like erasing a large part of who they are and their experience. Let’s not whitewash their experience, it’s multi-faceted."

This worry over ignoring the ethnicities of Sunday’s victims stems from the same reason reason people chanted, "Say their names," as actor and singer Nick Jonas was given a platform to speak at a vigil Monday evening in front of the historic Stonewall Inn in New York City. It came across as yet another moment for the greater LGBTQ community to prop up the words of a white, cisgender — and in this case, straight — man, reportedly before letting any LGBTQ people of color speak.

Even the battle over the legacy of the Stonewall Inn itself became contentious after Roland Emmerich’s movie Stonewall took the focus away from the trans and queer people of color who were involved while focusing the film on its white male protagonist.

While the character may have seemed palatable to Hollywood as a way to entice straight audiences — God forbid we portray the real lives of real queer people of color — ignoring that reality hurt the film. It led to a massive outcry and a boycott, and the film ended up being a box office failure.

But beyond these problems of violence and cultural representation, everyday discrepancies that harm LGBTQ people of color persist, too.

How this erasure spills into bigger problems for LGBTQ people of color

Two rights battles over the course of the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the past several decades are perfect illustrations of how the needs of people of color can go ignored. One of them begins with the very thing that seemed like the most quixotic goal for the movement: same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile, what seemed more feasible and would help more people, especially economically disadvantaged LGBTQ people? Barring discrimination in workplaces, schools, housing, and public accommodations. Besides, those protections existed for discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and sex.

Now same-sex marriage is a protected right across the country, which is an incredible win for LGBTQ Americans of all races. But the effort for a national law protecting queer workers from employer bias has remained fruitless for the past four decades, minus a patchwork of states that have passed anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBTQ citizens. This has left a class of LGBTQ people — again, of all races — economically vulnerable.

In addition to workplace discrimination, many LGBTQ people of color have pushed for other fights including LGBTQ youth homelessness, immigration, criminal justice reform, and high rates of HIV among young gay and bi men of color. These weighty problems get attention here and there but have largely been cast aside to take on issues with less racialized appeal.

But even things that seem as frivolous as racism on dating apps and the racial segregation of gay-friendly neighborhoods are everyday reminders of inequalities for LGBTQ people of color. The erasure of the ethnicities of the Latino and black people at Pulse on Sunday is one example of how their needs and identities are, at times, ignored within the greater LGBTQ rights movement, and therefore ignored in the general sense.

"The whitewashing of history that happens in white supremacy does three very dangerous things in creating a false sense of people's own worth, value, and accomplishments," Herukhuti told Vox. "It gives people who are racialized as white a false sense of superiority and ability, people who are racialized as nonwhite a false sense of inferiority and inability, and a false sense of each other. These false senses of ourselves and others leads to so many bad decisions and choices that hurt us as individuals and the society as a whole."

The sentiment seems like a nice alternative to the normal divisive rhetoric that many politicians, especially, have used to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans.

Update: Paul Ryan was identified as House Majority Leader, and not House Speaker.

Why shouldn't Orlando shooting be politicized?