Lucy Gellman Photos
There was a point in the 1980s when Barbara Fair, neighborhoods advocate and founder of My Brother’s Keeper, stopped going to funerals. Her son was young. His friends were dying. She was tired, so tired, of seeing small black bodies in boxes.
Called to respond to a homicide Tuesday night, police Officer Shafiq Abdussabur has that same feeling almost 30 years later.
His frustrations with the current state of gun violence in America came to the forefront on his weekly episode of WNHH radio’s “Urban Talk Radio,” which he dedicated entirely to the issue.
Joined in the studio by Fair and Ron Pinciaro, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, Abdussabur spent the hour talking out whether black lives really matter, why gun violence has seen a spike this year, and what activists, officers and youth in New Haven and beyond can do preventatively to create solutions.
“It seems that we are still black America, white America. Suburban and urban America,” he began, noting that people seem to pay more attention to white mass shooters than black-on-black violence in New Haven.
Fair agreed. “It’s not a new thing, but what I’ve been seeing lately — we focus on those mass shootings, but we’re not focusing on our kids who are dying every single day,” she said. “Did anyone ever bury the kid who died last week? People say black lives matter. But do they really? We don’t even talk about this until a white kid is shot.”
A supporter of Project Longevity — Fair is not — Pinciaro went right for the data. “I think the two biggest predictors are based on … population density and poverty,” he said.
“The black-on-black problem — that is just a manifestation of another problem. We’ve gotta fix that problem. There is a very big difference between education in the cities and the suburbs .… these kids are just as educable as everyone else, and why they’re not performing, I don’t understand.”
Abdussabur pushed it a step further, lending a voice to what those in the room had been saying in not so many words.
“There is no reaon why anyone should die at the hands of the gun,” he said.
To listen to the full episode, click on the audio above or find it in any podcatcher under “WNHH Community Radio.”
