The Santa Fe New Mexican took a stand on the nation’s “lost white woman” nonsense in a good Sept. 23 editorial. This country and its population of shallow citizens spend way too much time obsessing on the whereabouts of lost white women who have been kidnapped, killed or both.
America’s current obsession is with Gabby Petito, a non-descript 20-something-year-old with no special skills, talents or contributions to society. She was just missing, a woman and white.
Since she was found, we’re now focusing on “thoughts and prayers,” a favorite meaningless phrase, and memorials. How we’d love to have the money wasted on memorials all over the country. Those piles of flowers, teddy bears and cards could feed the hungry, house the homeless and address many municipal infrastructure needs.
One of the good things the pandemic gave us was we almost quit shooting each other in schools, malls and outside night clubs. Another bonus was national media didn’t focus on lost white women.
Of course that was because national media is so enamored with counting infections, updating us hourly. They counted dead bodies and did the math for us on how many more bodies will fit in this mobile freezer outside General Hospital X in Poughkeepsie.
Then it was endless, mindless “B roll” of freezers, blurred faces in ICUs and eventually vaccination after vaccination. It’s easy to see why we’d rather focus on a lost white woman than how many non-vaccinated people are now dead non-vaccinated people.
Several talented comedians have done great routines on how much media missing white women garner. The late, great Patrice O’Neal did a piece on Joran van der Sloot’s part in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, who had disappeared in the Bahamas in 2005 (two years previously), suckering the audience into proving his point.
He faked ignorance asking, “Who was that white woman disappeared in the Bahamas?” Half the audience, most of whom were Black, shouted Holloway’s name.
He then referred to Stephany Flores-Ramirez, a Chilean woman murdered by Van der Sloot in Peru a year after Holloway’s disappearance.
“Who was that Peruvian girl who got killed about six months ago?” No one knew her name.
It seems we can “Me too” and “Time’s Up” all we want but when it comes to white women disappearing, the public runs with it. Racism is still alive and well, apparently among all the ethnicities.
O’Neal wraps up that bit by saying if he ever goes hiking in the mountains or swimming in the ocean he’s taking a white baby with him. It’s the only way anyone would look for him if he were lost.
Why anyone outside the family cares about where this woman was, goes to what is going on in their own lives, or more accurately what’s not going on in their lives. Granted, some people transfer feelings to other’s misfortune much too quickly. But it’s not so much Americans are feeling an emotional loss in Gabby Petito’s disappearance. Actually there’s a name for it.
To write this editorial we had to Google the woman’s name. What came up first was a Wikipedia (not a reliable source for anything) entry for “Missing white woman syndrome.” Only in America.
“Missing white woman syndrome is a term used by social scientists and media commentators to refer to the observed disproportionate media coverage, especially in television, of missing-person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls compared to the relative lack of attention towards missing women who are not white, women of lower social classes, and missing men or boys,” the site states.
There is a 276-page study, complete with data, professional psychologists, sociologists, medical doctors and law enforcement.
We have a problem when there’s a label coined for the phenomena. And to clarify that definition, it’s not a “relative lack of attention” toward non-white women. It’s a total disregard for it.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland went on the offensive bringing forward the plight of thousands of missing and presumed murdered Native American girls and women in the country. In New Mexico you’d think at least our local television and radio stations would stop the mindless chatter about Petito being murdered. They could give that minute of “news” to someone missing in the checkerboard in Northwest New Mexico and Northeast Arizona.
We’d like to suggest an answer to the problem, but if television news takes out the minute of looking for a missing white woman, they’ll probably add stale footage of crowded ICUs, the same repeated shots of people getting vaccinated last March or two people arguing about a soccer stadium that Albuquerque can’t afford and has no business considering. Pick your poison.