Posted by Keturah Hetrick on June 1, 2020
As protests break out across the country, Democrats in Congress are far more likely than their GOP counterparts to hire non-white staffers and assign them to their civil rights and law enforcement portfolios. But staffers for both parties are still disproportionately white compared to the country they represent.
Among Democrats in both chambers, over one-third staffers handling those sensitive issues are non-white, according to LegiStorm data. One in three Democratic staffers in the House and one in four in the Senate is non-white.
Only seven percent of Republican staffers are non-white in each chamber. However, minorities are assigned even more infrequently to civil rights and law enforcement issues than their overall numbers would suggest. Among Republicans, 7 percent handling those portfolios in the House and 4 percent in the Senate are non-white.
Non-Hispanic or Latino white people make up 60 percent of the country's population,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Some people and organizations who "caught our eye" last week:
