'Black and Missing,' an HBO documentary, explores the socioeconomic factors and perceptions that play a role in the disappearances of Black women and girls.
Missing Black, Latinx, and Indigenous children and adults seldom make headlines or get search efforts the way white victims do. Their parents are asking for their children to get the same attention as Gabby Petito.
It’s not every day that a Facebook post finds a missing baby. It’s rare when the rescue happens in a few hours. And it’s even more extraordinary when the infant goes missing in Montgomery County, and a stranger riding the New York City subway looks up and recognizes the baby.
A missing Silver Spring baby has been found after an organization called the Black and Missing Foundation shared a photo of her with her father - and a woman was able to identify the pair all the way in New York.
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.