Gwen Ifill famously coined the expression “missing white woman syndrome” to explain our national obsession with a small subset of missing individuals—largely white and feminine—to the exclusion of many other victims, especially individuals 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 trying to find missing people of color when police and the media fall short. Their work can be the topic of the award-winning four-part HBO documentary series, “Black and Missing,” produced by Geeta Gandbhir and Soledad O’Brien.
For Catholics, this ought to be a pro-life issue, and one which we examine seriously. Forty percent of the about 600,000 individuals who went missing in 2019 were people of color—most of them Black. And it takes on average 4 times longer to resolve the cases of Black people.
Gloria and Natalie also discuss how the Black Lives Matter movement encompasses greater than police violence; it extends to the difficulty of police neglect to research cases of Black individuals gone missing.
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