I mean how is this even in dispute? For every white child or pretty white woman that goes missing there’s thousands of others that are largely ignored. This isn’t a race card thing, this is just fact. I can name plenty of white children and pretty white women that have gone missing over the time I’ve been alive simply by virtue of the never ending news cycles that surrounded their disappearances. Names like Adam Walsh, Jon-Benet Ramsay, Laci Petersen, Polly Klaas, and Elizabeth Smart are permanently etched into my memory. Guess what they all have in common?
The media has been going in a complete frenzy about this story for the past week because it has all the ingredients of a “great” story:
Pretty, young white woman
“Influencer”
Asshole boyfriend
“Great American road trip gone bad”
Best of all: continually unfolding drama that only gets “better” as time goes on.
I’d imagine if she wasn’t a pretty young white woman (with “influencer” adding some more “newsworthiness”) that the entire story at best would be relegated to the little ticker that runs below the chyron on news stations.
With some armchair lawyering for good measure. (Which I fully admit to being a part of.)
This also works in reverse, as sometimes pretty white girls can get national attention for doing something bad. Casey Anthony being a good example. This does not extend to punishments which is a whole other rabbit hole of race issues.
I believe, it’s partially random which stories really get national attention. Police brutality has happened for a long time to many people, but only specific cases just happen to get national attention and outrage. It may be that a single reporter does a good story during a time when other news is slow. Then the story is picked up by other outlets which then spreads.
It’s hard to know which story is going to get national attention and why. It’s like predicting the next big fad or the stock market. You know it is out there, but the conditions have to be just right for it to take-off and no one person, media outlet, company, government can completely control it even if they think they can. That lack of complete control by anyone is what is so beautiful.
It’s easy to know that the victims that become famous and so widely cared about in the U.S. are almost always conventionally attractive white women, and sometimes cute white girls. Period.
Not a question at all. San Diego has a quite similar recent case: pretty, young woman who had a troubled relationship, then vanished, and a husband who won’t answer questions about her disappearance. Yet it can’t get any national media/social media traction because she looks Asian, and her family is Asian. Even the local news coverage is pretty much only from this one site.
Indeed. Whether some people want to acknowledge it, it’s a provable fact.
And here’s the real rub about all this hyper-concern over pretty White women as victims - society only actually cares about them as the “property” of White men.
The only case I can think of involving missing POC that got a lot of media coverage was the Bradley sisters, but that was probably only because they were children and sisters. Maybe it was only covered in Chicago though?
You really need to read up on how media works. It’s not random. People in the media (which is still dominated by white, middle and upper class men, especially behind the scenes) make choices based on their own internalized biases, which they mistake as “common sense.” These people center their own experiences and beliefs as “normal” and “universal” and then deploy that on TV in the expectation that everyone else shares their view of what’s normal. This works to reinforce this sense of the white man as representative of the norm of humanity. This is why diversity is so critical, because it helps us to understand that our own experiences as white people are not necessarily universal.
No. It was very much on the mind of many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, when images of police beating school children in their Sunday best was being broadcast across America. People were shocked and outraged, because it was obvious scenes of brutality that many white American thought did not exist in their society, but was rather something that only happened in places like the Eastern Bloc or the worst dictatorships. Nope. It was not even a new thing then. The same thing happened in the antebellum period, when abolitionist literature rose to national prominence via newspapers and magazines, books, and people traveling to give lectures (Fredrick Douglass, among others)). And again with the rise of the lynching regime, when white Americans were once again shocked to learn that the Black men lynched at the hands of white mobs had very much NOT raped a white woman, but had in fact, just been economically successful or stood up for himself, his family, and his community. Each and every time this happens, we got through a period of erasure on the realities of racial violence and white people who believe that we live in a color blind society are once again blindsided by the realities of racial violence that is STILL visited upon communities of color, especially those that are working class.
No. It’s not. There are patterns that you can see, such as white women getting more attention for either tragically being brutally murdered (with the patriarchal roots of that being hand waved away time and again) or engaging in bad behavior in some manner. White women dominate this sort of news cycles, because it draws viewers and reinforces the racial regime that far too many of us are willing to ignore for our own comfort.
All you got to do is pay the slightest bit of attention…
I had never heard of that, so yeah, probably local coverage. I’d wager to find a story of children of color disappearing in large numbers, you’d have to go all the way back to the Atlanta Child murders…
In Canada we tried talking about it. The news from the inquiry seemed to be split between in fighting on the commission, actual progress and saying their funding/mandate did not cover certain things.
I think we are marginally better than we were about missing indigenous women. However I am sure there is a possibility that a survey of media stories could prove me wrong.
Between Robert Pickton and the Highway of Tears in BC - we should be much better than we are.
I agree 100% on the non-white and poor aspects, but the idea that violence against women is paid attention to/considered important is total BS. Media focusing on one woman once in a rare while makes it seem like it happens once in a relatively rare while, which is also complete BS!!!
I suspect it would be the same if US women killed 2.54 of their husbands and boyfriends in the US per day? It seems most people don’t really give a sh*t when the victims are female and murdered by men who claim to love them: ESPECIALLY non-white women, but white women too.
The reality is that violence against women and murder is so accepted, so normalized, and considered so unimportant that literally only the most privileged women in the country even get heightened concern.
Pointing this out for the sake of the many missing women and unsolved murder victims who are not rich white women with an internet presence is calling for social justice.
But the problem isn’t that people are caring about those few white straight cis women who also are not sex workers, it’s that the default for our country’s media and actual justice system is not caring about most women. Particularly when DV is involved and it very often is.
Maybe I’m just a cynical bastardess… but why do so many people only seem to be in uproar over the lack of attention to countless murders and violence against non-white women when they can frame the current pretty-white-female-murder-victim-du-jour as if she’s stealing their spotlight? (Women! So catty, am I rite?/s)
If the only time you acknowledge/seem to care about the immense violence against non-white women and missing non-white people is when media covers a dead white women, I worry that maybe you don’t actually give much of a sh*t?
Almost seems like they only see the many unsolved murders and systemic failures of justice for countless non-white women as a cute way to dismiss calls for justice for any woman’s murder while making a pretense and virtue signaling, don’t it?
I would argue that in certain contexts, it IS, but not to address the root of the problem, which is violent misogyny. Instead, it serves as a way to draw in viewers to news programs. The deaths of women like Petito are generally sensationalized and completely decontextualized from the larger problem we all face as women in the world.
Yes!
Um, no. It’s to show how racism functions in our society alongside misogyny. They are mutually reinforcing.
INFLUENCER! 
