Giving Compass' Take:

• Rohit Malhotra, writing for Medium, argues that Atlanta, GA is the most unequal city in America and the reason for that is because it doesn't trust Black women to lead. 

• How can donors channel more of their support to Black leaders? What needs to be done to change Atlanta's unequal institutions?

• Read about how Black women are changing their cities' art scenes. 

We are in a public health emergency that is taking a disproportionate toll on Black lives in the middle of a debate on whether those lives even matter. This feels unprecedented, but none of this is new for Black women in Atlanta. COVID-19 puts Black women at risk of being rushed into hospital systems where they are already stigmatized and notoriously misdiagnosed by doctors who rarely look like them. Black women are advised to stay home, but they are also at greatest risk of losing a job that ironically values their labor at three-fifths of a white man’s dollar. Black women have long been in a state of emergency — but for some reason, it took a global pandemic and civil uprising for the rest of the world to see it.

Black women have been telling us about the need to address these systemic issues for over a century. They led strikes in 1881 demanding equal pay, marches against segregation in 1929, and protests pushing for the right to vote in 1968. Their children, grandchildren, and now even great grandchildren are in the streets, holding up some of the same signs with the same messages. Over the years, often out of necessity rather than market opportunity, Black women have built organizations, organized movements, and moved policy boulders to ensure that Atlanta’s decades-long obsession with ribbon-cuttings as a metric of economic success doesn’t leave behind the communities whose narratives were used to market their own displacement.

Read the full article about Atlanta's inequality problem by Rohit Malhotra at Medium.