You’re correct. It would have absolutely made a difference. When a pretty white woman goes missing I hear about it from every news outlet, it becomes a national crisis.
Black women go missing all the time, and we don’t hear about it. Not just because of racism, but also because of the profit-driven nature of the media. They know that a significant portion of the approximately 76% of the US population are going to be glued to their goddamned televisions, phones, and computers generating all that sweet, sweet, ad revenue and it’s only gotten worse.
If Jon-Benet Ramsey died today, we’d have something like “The Jon-Benet Ramsey Report–brought to you by Coca Cola! Quench your thirst for justice, with an ice cold Coca Cola!”
The same goes for women the media doesn’t think are conventionally attractive or “relateable” enough. For instance, Natalee Halloway went missing on a trip to Aruba and it was a national crisis, there’s wikipedia page about it with over 200 sources and more material than lots of other more historically significant topics. Meanwhile, hundreds of conventionally attractive homeless women around the same age go missing all the time and they’re lucky if they show up at the bottom of those weekly bundles of paper advertising the postal service stuffs in your mailbox every week. The media says, “ew, homeless? Nobody really cares about that, let’s terrify people with completely inaccurate stories about illegal immigration instead.” Missing homeless people aren’t going to make Greta Van Sursteren and Nancy Grace millions of dollars, so they don’t get any coverage. (Not to mention the people who run their networks, and the people who plaster ads all over those networks.)
Worse yet is the law enforcement response. I mean, good god, Halloway had both the military and law enforcement searching for her around the clock. They deployed F-16s with FLiR cameras, helicopters, and people running over every square foot of Aruba with a fine-toothed comb.
It’s not that I’m trying to say that Halloway’s disappearance and presumed death isn’t important, I’m just asking where that level of response is when other people go missing? An F-16 costs an average of about $14k/hr to operate, why do we suddenly have all this money and manpower to search for this one person, but not for the hundreds of other people that go missing year after year?
It’s not just people in situations like homelessness that get ignored either. Just being lower middle-class or below is enough to get you ignored. In 2016 eight people from Pike county, Ohio–an entire family–was murdered seemingly in their sleep by unknown assailants with unknown motives. Those assailants not only murdered an entire family (in two separate homes), they killed their guard dogs, and removed the security cameras and recording devices the family had put up to protect their property. Three young children were spared. Sure, it got coverage, but only just. They were very poor, living in a poor county, in the middle of the foothills of Ohio, and to make matters worse, one of the younger sons had been growing and selling fairly insignificant amounts of marijuana to help keep the bills paid. It got coverage, but only just, and that coverage mainly emphasized the shock value, then went on to excuse it as “probably drug related” and moved on to more “pressing” matters. Here now a year later and there’s basically zero national coverage, and even local news coverage is still largely nonexistent.
If the situation was identical in every way except the Rhodens were wealthy and lived in big nice houses in the same place, the media would still probably be losing their minds over it. There’d be regular segments on news programs that would seize upon every new shred of evidence, every new rumor, grocery store tabloids would be following the legitimately heartbreaking struggle of the three children left alive. It would be called things like “America’s Tragedy” and it people would be raising millions to help fund the investigation.
So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Both race and class play a disgustingly disproportionate role in the amount of attention cases get both from the media and law enforcement. For fuck’s sake, I watched multiple cops murder multiple black men last year on camera and the vast majority of them got off with no punishment whatsoever, and when people had the audacity to complain about it, the movement was immediately labeled as racist against whites and potentially dangerous and prompted rallies in support of the goddamned cops. Do people not realize that cops have shit like tanks, body armor, and machine guns now? They don’t need support, everybody else does.
