When the late Gwen Ifill used the phrase “Missing White Woman Syndrome” at a 2004 journalism conference, she was responding to news anchor Suzanne Malveaux’s concern that US media outlets had failed to cover international genocides early on, including Rwanda and Kosovo. Malvaeux told the diverse crowd: “In 1994, during Rwanda, we were looking at Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.” The two figure skaters had received more coverage than a million genocide victims and survivors. Ifill playfully interrupted her, mocking newsroom executives: “If it’s a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that, every day.” The room welcomed her interjection with resounding applause.
But rather than being celebrated as part of Malveaux’s criticism of US-centric media, “Missing White Woman Syndrome” has found a life of its own. Commentators widely use it now to describe the disparity in media coverage that missing young, conventionally attractive white women receive over missing Black and brown people.
This disparity is real. Black people constitute 13% of the US population and 31% of missing persons; 54% of missing persons are white, though they make up 76% of the population. A 2013 study found that news outlets covered missing white women significantly more often, and more intensely, than everyone else. As Charles Blow recently penned: “It is not that these white women should matter less, but rather that all missing people should matter equally. Race should not determine how newsroom leaders assign coverage, especially because those decisions often lead to disproportionate allocation of government resources, as investigators try to solve the highest-profile cases.” Advocates and families of color express that the disparate media coverage signals that their loved ones’ lives don’t matter as much as the lives of white women, which they believe then discourages police from pouring resources to pursue the cases.
Disparity and visibility are such fickle things. We can safely assume that the exorbitant alarms around particular kinds of white women who go missing and the silence around missing Black and Indigenous women presents racial, gender, and class equity issues. But what is missing from the popular disparity discourse surrounding “Missing White Woman Syndrome” is that cops and cover stories were never meant to rescue our loved ones, and those of us who make this demand might turn up empty.
The response makes sense. White women’s cries and lies have galvanized law enforcement and lynch mobs to act on their behalf for centuries. Perhaps it’s because society treats white women as human beings worth saving. But history offers a more nuanced account. For example, when Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, a poorly-written and oft-misused law to combat sex slavery and human trafficking, cops and investigators were often sent to “rescue” white women from places where they wanted to be. White women who were living with Black men, immigrants, or poor white men, for instance, or adult women who were sex workers, were forcibly removed by police claiming to be protecting them. Yet when those same types of white women being “helped” demanded equity, housing, voting rights, and education to be safe and decrease their vulnerability to actual predation, white men – including police – usually resisted these efforts. Instead, they invested in criminalization, police, and prosecution. Legal scholar Aya Gruber explains that “white women’s alliance with law enforcement stemmed from not just racism and racial privilege but also women’s need for power and protection in a society that significantly restricted their social, sexual, and economic liberty.” Thus, the sweeping law enforcement responses to missing white women could be considered a failure of society, not an accomplishment or a goal.
For missing Black people, police and mainstream outlets do very little, if anything, to recover them. Both have a longer history of hurting than of helping. Mainstream, white-run papers published “for sale” and “wanted” advertisements to help facilitate slave trade, while law enforcement and judges belonged to elaborate networks that kidnapped free Black people and runaways to sell them into slavery. During Reconstruction, while newly freed Black people went searching for their friends, families, and lovers who had been stolen from them, cops spent their time disappearing Black people, disabled people, and immigrants so that cities and states could rent them out for convict lease labor. African Americans had known that police and white-run newspapers were not on their side, so they used mutual aid and hundreds of Black newspapers in their quests to be reunited.
Much has happened since then. Policing duties have expanded and Black newspapers have been decimated. Black people and indigenous people have launched organizations to help families and communities find their loved ones all over the world. We find faces of the disappeared on websites, social media, electricity poles, and grocery store boards. Missing persons cases have declined nearly by half since 1997 and 90% of them are ultimately recovered. In 2019, for example, 609,000 people were listed as missing and police eventually cancelled 607,000 of those entries. The remaining people should be sought for vigorously; we should ask the best way how rather than assuming that the answer is endless news coverage and growing police budgets.
But what also seems to be growing is the notion that the amount of media coverage that a missing person receives, or the number of resources that police expend to find them, is a litmus test for the value of Black life. This is as understandable as it is frightening. Understandable because media coverage spreads awareness that could lead to clues – a tip, a hidden life, or a found body (though according to the 2013 study above, little data supports that sweeping national and intense coverage helps with these searches).
Frightening, because coverage that very few white women receive in news stories and police response becomes the metric of what it means to be seen as human. How much does the humanity of Black women cost? Is it a dollar amount for how much law enforcement resources are expended to find us? The number of hours of media coverage? And why do we give the media and the police so much power to decide how human we are?
Invisibility and disparity can make someone believe that what someone else has is desirable, so then we fight for it, too, not asking whether it’s poison. The demand for more policing to see people of color as human, and as people worth searching for, will marshal resources for police. Federal, state and local authorities will undoubtedly decide to give more money to police to become body searchers, rather than investing in eliminating the reasons why people go missing in the first place, including interpersonal abuse, homophobia and exploitation. If we dared to imagine different metrics for our humanity, we could save more lives instead of searching for more bodies.
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist. Her book Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom is out next month
