It may be one of the saddest truisms of modern media: Attractive white women get news coverage when they go missing. But missing women of color often get media coverage only when people notice how much attention everyone is paying to the white women.
The HBO documentary directed by Soledad O'Brien and Geeta Gandbhir follows Derrica and Natalie Wilson, who are reuniting families and advocating for missing Black people.
If we asked you to name a missing white woman, someone whose name you’ve seen in a national news headline sometime in the last 20 years, could you? You could: Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Lori Hacking, Jennifer Wilbanks — household names forever etched in our memories, right? Now, think of the name of at least one missing person of color.
Thousands of families in the U.S. are currently living a nightmare. Their loved ones are missing, and they are desperate to bring media and police attention to their cases.
A documentary series follows the work of the Black and Missing Foundation which has been sounding the alarm for years about bias and stereotypes in Black missing persons cases.
Every year, tens of thousands of women and girls disappear in the U.S. Each disappearance is a tragedy, but for missing Black people, their cases remain unsolved four times longer than those of white people.
A Trinidadian woman will be featured on a new HBO docu-series aimed at raising awareness on missing people from minority communities in the United States.