Ayanna Alexander is a START Reporter at Bloomberg BNA.

Weeks after the Parkland shooting, Johnetta Elzie, a civil rights activist who rose to prominence during the 2014 Ferguson protests, scrolled through her Twitter feed like most Americans, observing how the media treated the Parkland students fighting for gun reform—and she was perplexed.

These students’ ideas and voices were welcomed, she observed, while her voice and others like hers had been shunned and even ignored just four years earlier after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. Even though, to her, they were all speaking out against the same thing: gun violence in America.


The difference was that Elzie had been protesting police violence, specifically, which she says is a major part of the broader gun violence debate. While the Parkland kids were lauded, she was labeled a “threat actor.” FBI agents attempted to contact her about her plans to protest at the 2016 Republican National Convention, a tactic she insists was meant to intimidate her and her family. Similar complaints and calls to action by advocacy groups like the Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter, NAACP chapters and the American Civil Liberties Union were criticized and classified as attacks on American law enforcement heroes.

“It made me wonder, what does it feel like to have protests with corporate sponsors? I don’t know,” Elzie said, considering the differences between the Ferguson protest and the Parkland-inspired March for Our Lives rally. “On Twitter, I had a thread that showed just how big of a difference there was between our protests—people of color—and theirs: like having free hotel rooms and things. People were really maxing out credit cards trying to really help these children and these brands are willing to give so much to them, and I think that is because—at the center of it—we’re talking about gun violence.”

“But, I believe that police violence is a part of gun violence,” she said.

Elzie is not alone in her position. The five student victims propelled to center stage after the Parkland shooting are all white except for Emma Gonzalez, who identifies as Cuban. And the overwhelmingly positive reception these younger, whiter activists have received has not gone unnoticed by civil rights activists who come from and are pushing for marginalized communities to be heard in the fight for gun reform. These activists maintain that the debate on gun violence has historically excluded the concerns of some groups most affected by it. In a country where guns are used to kill about 10 times more black children than white children each year, there cannot be meaningful policy reform, they say, without considering how gun violence affects all Americans—not just white Americans.

These activists don’t blame the Parkland kids. Since the March for our Lives rally, the Parkland victims have been trying to champion those who haven’t been given the same exposure they have had. David Hogg, for example, called out the media during an interview, saying they didn’t give his black classmates a voice. Activists like Elzie agree; she says most Americans still aren’t paying attention.

For Elzie, this is especially true when it comes to police violence. According to Mapping Police Violence, which tracks deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers, police have killed more than 300 people so far this year. At least 120 of those killed were people of color; 70 were specified with an “unknown” race. Mapping Police Violence found that more than 1,100 people were killed by police in 2017—92 percent with firearms. One hundred and forty-nine of those killed by cops were unarmed, and more than half of the unarmed fatalities were people of color.

“The problem is, one, the majority of Americans doesn’t believe police violence is violent and, two, it’s a matter of humanity,” Elzie said. “If you don’t see black people as human or as people who deserve the same baby gloves that other people get when they’re interacting with the police, then I don’t think the conversation is off to a fair start in the first place.”

This same complaint has prompted the first National Black Men’s Convention, which took place in Washington this past weekend. At the convention, black leaders gathered to discuss police killings, racism and other “national challenges facing Black men and the Black race,” according to a news release. “The escalating pace of police killings nationwide are international human rights violations and we must seek United Nations assistance and international remedies because the Trump Administration deliberately fails to act on rogue police murderers across this nation,” convention founder, Malik Shabazz, said.

Some lawmakers are taking action, too. Inspired by the March shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, killed by police, California Assembly members Kevin McCarty and Shirley Weber co-authored a measure aimed at holding police accountable and raising the standard on the use of deadly force. The “Police Accountability and Community Protection Act,” requires that “police officers use deadly force only when it is necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death.”

“Existing use-of-force laws have made an encounter with law enforcement—no matter how ordinary and no matter whether an individual is unarmed or even cooperative—into one that ends in the death of a civilian,” Weber said in announcing the bill. “The worst possible outcome is increasingly the only outcome, especially in communities of color.”

Activists say conversations around gun reform have excluded minorities and disenfranchised communities for years. “It’s intentional for that narrative, especially when we’re talking about politics, to tap into anti-blackness, and when we have conversations around gun violence, public health, safety, education, this country’s agenda—because it’s led by mostly white men who are in political office and Congress—it’s in [the interest of] their reputation to always exclude and not prioritize young people of color, LGBT communities, and those in low-income" areas, said Tiffany Dena Loftin, national director of the NAACP Youth and College Division. “So, what we have to do is make sure that when we show up, we continue to push and make known what our agenda items are and what issues of gun violence look like in our communities specifically, so we can have a holistic, intersectional conversation around solutions.”

Loftin, who detailed how she and students will force inclusivity in a one-minute speech during the March for our Lives rally, explained that the NAACP Youth and College Division, which focuses on reforming policing from the collegiate level, wants to craft reform from the inside, not just shout from the sidelines. “If we want to be included and heard, we have to move past the advocacy and we have to demand shared governance,” she said. “Shared governance means you’re not just yelling from outside the administration office. You’re not just writing petitions or talking and tweeting about it on social media. But, you are demanding as a student that you get a seat at the table and vote and decide what actions get taken, what principles get passed, and what higher staff and administrators are doing to support campus life and safety.”

Some cite the call for increased police presence in schools—a policy promoted by the Parkland students and President Donald Trump—as a typical example of how reform efforts are not addressing minority concerns. Police violence, for example, plagues African-American communities on a daily basis, so boosting police presence doesn’t ease the minds of children of color or black activists and lawmakers.

Florida State Senate Minority Leader Oscar Braynon recently pushed back against arming teachers, urging the need for more resources in “inner-city” communities to curb gun violence. He said he still hasn’t seen a valid dialogue among his Senate peers to promote gun safety for people of color. (In February, he and a group of Senate Democrats in Florida vowed to attach gun legislation that protects all of their constituents to any bill during the 2018 session.) Now, he’s asking that there be more money allocated to address the mental health of all afflicted by gun violence—not just white people.

“When we talk about mental health, have we talked about it in terms of the kids that see it every day in the inner-city communities?” he said. “Are we putting money into the mental health of those communities—for black kids, brown kids and LGBT kids? Those are the types of things that I wish to see included in the gun-reform conversation. Only that can make it all-inclusive, and I’ll continue to push for that.”

Marginalized communities of color include another group that has been disproportionately affected by gun violence: transwomen of color.

According to a study conducted by the Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition, there were 102 recorded murders of transgender people between January 2013 and 2017. Of those 102 deaths, 88 were transwomen—and 61 of those transwomen were victims of gun violence. Last year, out of at least 26 known murders of trans people, 24 were transwomen of color, according to GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign.

Dr. Lourdes Hunter, executive director of the Trans Women of Color Collective, said she didn’t expect the plight of transwomen of color to be included in the conversation about gun reform, so she wasn’t disappointed when it wasn’t.

She did, however, refer to the manifesto proposed by the Parkland students as violent to the transgender community. Hunter’s specific concern focused on their request to change privacy laws so that mental health care providers can provide health information to law enforcement.

“Transpeople have to conform to a mental diagnosis called gender identity dysphoria in order to get medical care and coverage,” Hunter said. “The communication between mental health care providers and law enforcement not only pathologizes people who have mental health issues, it also further puts transpeople in a place with barriers.” Once psychologists can communicate diagnoses with law enforcement, she said, discrimination against the transgender community will grow.

“Just being honest, and not that I expected it to be, but [the Parkland kids’] manifesto just wasn’t informed or aligned with people who are most disproportionately impacted by gun violence and state-sanctioned violence. Period.”

Following the murder of Amia Tyrae Berryman, a black transwoman in Baton Rouge, in March, gun advocacy organization Moms Demand Action highlighted the problem of gun violence in the transgender community, as they’ve done in the past.

Angelle Bradford, a volunteer in the Louisiana chapter of Moms Demand Action, said the lack of knowledge about the problem has a lot to do with the absence of awareness among cisgender communities, including cisgender communities of color. “I’m in the world of gun violence and it takes a minute for me to even hear the names of transwomen of color who have died due to guns, and let it sink in,” Bradford said.

Bradford said she’s fighting with Moms Demand Action by building a rapport with politicians on the ground to amplify the voices of those who are disenfranchised—especially among the transgender community. She noted, “people of color have even dropped the ball on that.”

Gun violence affects many corners of American life, but activists maintain that incorporating the woes, concerns and perspectives of everyone afflicted is not only possible, it’s necessary for an honest debate. “If the more privileged are at the front, what happens to the more marginalized students or communities? Erasure,” Elzie said. “Just good ol’ erasure.”

Loftin says the solution could be to move beyond uplifting words and unite disparate gun policy reform movements—literally. “We’re thinking short-term as a movement,” Loftin says. “So, let’s merge the Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March, and the March for Our Lives and make sure our agendas and voices are heard so this country doesn’t look or act the same.”

“If we’re not showing up for each other, and if we’re not standing with each other to make sure our message is out there, then we’re not really doing the work,” she said. “The only way we’re going to change things for all of us is to make America be the America it pretends to be.”