Gwen Ifill famously coined the expression “missing white woman syndrome” to describe our national obsession with a small subset of missing persons—largely white and female—to the exclusion of many other victims, especially persons of color.
This week on “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” Gloria talks to Natalie Wilson, the co-founder of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., a Maryland-based nonprofit dedicated to searching for missing people of color when police and the media fall short. Their work is also the subject of the award-winning four-part HBO documentary series, “Black and Missing,” produced by Geeta Gandbhir and Soledad O’Brien.
For Catholics, this should be a pro-life issue, and one that we examine seriously. Forty percent of the about 600,000 people who went missing in 2019 were people of color—most of them Black. And it takes on average four times longer to resolve the cases of Black people.
Gloria and Natalie also discuss how the Black Lives Matter movement encompasses more than police violence; it extends to the issue of police neglect to investigate cases of Black persons gone missing.
Lastly, if you’ve been enjoying the Gloria Purvis Podcast please consider sharing some feedback in this brief Listener Survey!
Links:
