Disappeared: Missing White Woman Syndrome

Missing white woman syndrome is a disease that effects this country in a bad way. I am not trying to make a racist blog entry but it is true, the sheer media coverage that missing upper middle class white women get when they go missing is astonishing to say the least. It is, in a way, a kind of sickening example of just how bias the media of today is. Missing white woman syndrome also over shadows white males who go missing. Today’s entry is going to talk a little about missing white woman syndrome and the TV show that really portrays this, Disappeared.

I love the show Disappeared. I feel it is informative, violent, scary and depressing. These are all traits of a show that makes me want to watch, again and again. I have seen just about every episode and I started to notice one thing. It is something, that I don’t think has ever been discussed in a forum, or maybe it has been overlooked, but the TV show Disappeared only shows missing white people, and mostly white women.

Now, I know what you’re thinking;

“Come on man, that is such, BS”

Now that we got that out of our system. I personally went to the website for the TV show Disappeared and out of  45 episodes, there has only been 2 missing persons that were black and the rest were white people. Out of the missing white people about 9 were male and the rest were white women. Go to the website for the TV show if you don’t believe me. I think it is weird, but this is how the media works and it has always been this way.

I think the reason why this is so, is that we as a nation have this real hard on, when it comes to looking for missing white women. I mean a good example of this is when Natalee Halloway disappeared on May 30^th of 2005. It was a huge media event. Every night newscast would report on any progress on that case. I mean it was insane at the amount of news coverage that was received when that little girl disappeared from the island of Aruba.

About five months later a woman named Latoyia Figueroa disappeared. She was five months pregnant, but the media did not really report on her case at all. Even though five months had past, they was still a lot of coverage on Natalee Halloway, which was five months cold, but none for Figueroa, who like Laci Petersen, was pregnant and later found murdered.

I mean the Figueroa case and the Laci Petersen case and Figueroa case were almost a mirrored yin and yang type case. Petersen was murdered and dumped by her scum bag husband, Scott Petersen. Latoyia Figueroa disappeared on October 13^th 2005 and was found murdered and dumped by her scumbag boyfriend Stephen Poaches. I mean it took them a long while to find Laci and it the police a long while to find Latoyia. It the scheme of things it seems that the Petersen and Figueroa case are so similar in almost every detail, with the exception of one little thing. Figueroa was black Latina while Petersen was white.

The Figueroa family was trying hard to get the media to take some interest and they finally did. In fact the media was criticized by many bloggers and pundents as to why the Halloway case was still getting so much attention while the Figueroa case which was fresh at the time, got nothing.

The Figueroa case did, sort of, get the ball rolling on this obsession with missing white women syndrome that our country suffers from, but it really hasn’t changed much and the TV show Disappeared is a prime example of that. I mean it is totally unbalanced with the amount of coverage that missing white women get while all kinds of women disappear or get kidnapped or just vanish. I mean during the Chandra Levy case over 10 years ago another woman named Joyce Chiang has disappeared at the same time, but their was no media coverage of her case, probably because she was from Taiwan and not as important as the missing white woman.

Finally, this is from the Maddox website, but when the Elizabeth Smart case came about in 2002 about how she was kidnapped and finally released at the same time, a little African American girl named Erica Pratt, from Philadelphia, who was 7 years old at the time, was kidnapped by two men. She was tied up and held for almost 24 hours in a dark and decrepit basement. Using her wits she was able to get herself free and was able to escape the basement. Did she get crazy and massive amounts of media coverage. Nope.

Disappeared and missing white woman syndrome is something that really needs to be stopped. I feel we need to really stop and think about this. Why is it that a well off, pretty white girl get more coverage then say a Hispanic girl or black girl that goes missing?

Why?

Why?