America has a racist history — one that has permeated every facet of our culture and will forever linger. Mainstream media is no exception, showing more attention and care to white bodies than darker ones.
Since July 2014, fourteen young black and Latina girls have gone missing in the Bronx, six of whom went missing this past June alone. Initial concerns linked the disappearance to a forced prostitution ring, yet, until recently, it’s been nearly impossible to find information online about any of these girls.
The most recent girl to disappear, 20-year-old Maylin Reynoso, blew up on social media after those who knew her realized there was no coverage of her disappearance from news outlets other than Latin-specific ones.
Instead, these major news outlets were covering the disappearance of 30-year-old Karina Vetrano, an Italian-American woman assaulted and murdered in the same week as Reynoso.
The murder of Vetrano is horrific and significant, but why isn’t Reynoso, who showed up dead four days later in the Harlem River, also making headlines? The story of a possible forced prostitution ring targeting minors as young as 12 is definitely newsworthy.
Reynoso’s story and the other black and Latina girls who were reported missing have become a symbol of awareness for the tens of thousands of young women of color who go missing every year across the country.
Another example of women of color suffering from lack of media attention involves Native American women. On some reservations, Native women are murdered at more than ten times the national average, yet no organization, federal or private, knows how many Native women are actually missing.
What has allowed a whole group of people to be so wholly ignored by mainstream culture that their own country doesn’t even keep tabs on crimes against them?
Despite women of color going missing at higher rates than white women, they receive less media coverage from mainstream sources. This tendency for news outlets to cover murders and abductions of affluent white girls more than those of boys, poor kids, and children of color has been termed by PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill as “Missing White Girl Syndrome.”
This is just another example of how white women and children are considered more valuable by U.S. culture. The news value is lowered when people of color are the subject of crime because of a common view that these individuals are not blameless in their own disappearance.
The typical image of a missing person correlates with the general image of innocence: blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin.
This mindset is more than just neglectful — it’s dangerous. Of course, some cases need more attention than others, but the devaluing of people of color who go missing causes them to receive less attention and puts less pressure on law enforcement to investigate and prosecute their cases.
The stark contrast in coverage is even more troubling when we consider the rates at which people of color go missing compared to white people. Black Americans make up just 13 percent of the population, yet they account for 34 percent of all missing persons.
News outlets have a responsibility to alert audiences of insidious acts within their communities, regardless of race. When these outlets fail to fully report certain missing persons cases, they don’t just fail the families of these victims, but the millions of other women of color who are further at risk by not being alerted to the dangers facing them.
As Malcolm X once famously said, and Beyoncé later made famous to white people in Lemonade, “The most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person in America is the black woman.”
Ryan Thaxton is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from Monroe, Louisiana.