Consider This from NPR - Missing White Woman Syndrome: Media Bias And Missing People of Color

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Every year about 600,000 thousand people are reported missing in the United States per the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database.In 2022, about 34,000 people reported as actively missing were people of color. But people of color who disappear seldom get the same amount of media attention devoted to white people who go missing - especially white women and children. The late journalist Gwen Ifill coined the phrase "Missing White Woman Syndrome" to describe the media's fascination with, and detailed coverage of, the cases of missing or endangered white women - compared to the seeming disinterest in covering the disappearances of people of color.NPR's Juana Summers speaks with David Robinson II. His son, Daniel Robinson, has been missing for nearly two years. And Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, who has been helping him find answers.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. No one has heard from missing 25-year-old Jelani Day in more than a week now, and his family is still searching for answers. Today marks six years since Keisha Jacobs disappeared in Richmond. She was just 21 years old at the time. Today, these are just some of the people of color who have gone missing over the last few years.

Ashley Loring, who also goes by Ashley Heavy Runner, was last seen in Browning on June 8, 2017. The Bureau of Indian... Today marks three years since five-year-old Dulce Maria Alaves disappeared from a New Jersey park, and tonight the question remains, where is Dulce? Today marks nine years since an eight-year-old girl went missing in D.C. The search for Relisha Rudd hasn't stopped, and today... And some of them are still missing. You might be hearing their names for the first time because their cases have not received as much national media coverage as cases involving missing white women and children.

At the beginning, it was like a thousand other such cases. A stomach-climbing phone call. She's missing. Lacey Peterson. On the night before Christmas, she was gone. Please, please, please let her go. Nearly two decades later, we have new developments in the Natalie Holloway case. The prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of the 18-year-old Alabama high school student

will now be extradited to the U.S. from... The desperate search for Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old who vanished on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend. Police now... It seems the nation is searching for Gabby Petito, but her boyfriend... Every year, about 600,000 people are reported missing in the United States. That number comes from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Database. In 2022 alone, about 34,000 people reported to be actively missing were people of color.

Not every missing persons case gets reported to the police, but of the ones that do get reported, those involving people of color tend not to make headlines in the same way as some cases of missing white people. Take the disappearance of Natalie Holloway back in 2005 and, more recently, Gabby Petito. Their stories have been the focus of true crime podcasts and highlighted in TV specials and documentaries. Why not the same media attention when people of color go missing? Well, the answer actually has a name. Missing White Woman Syndrome. That phrase, Missing White Woman syndrome, was coined by the journalist Gwen Eiffel, who died back in 2016. It refers to the media's fascination with covering missing or

otherwise endangered white women and the media's seeming disinterest in covering the disappearances of people of color. If there's a missing white woman, we're going to cover that every day. Consider this. The amount of media attention that a missing persons case gets can affect what happens with that case and the person at the heart of it. The lack of media coverage for people of color often means their loved ones struggle not only to get news coverage for the case, but also police resources dedicated to finding them. Coming up, we'll hear from a father whose son has been missing for nearly two years and the founder of an organization helping him search for answers. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Thursday, June 8th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working together to create a just world where all people have access to renewable energy, clean air and water, and healthy food. The Schmidt Family Foundation is part of the philanthropic organizations and initiatives created and funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt to work toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. It's Consider This from NPR. There are various studies that back up the notion that people of color who go missing

don't get featured in the news as much. The Columbia Journalism Review went through 3,600 stories from U.S. news outlets that featured missing people in 2021. They found that if a Black man went missing in St. Louis, for instance, there would be around a dozen news stories about him. But a young white woman from the same place would attract 10 times the media coverage. David Robinson II knows what it's like to have to fight for the attention of the media, the police, and the public in the hope of finding his son. Media wasn't really at the time reaching back out, so I had to keep pressing and pressing. David's son, 24-year-old Daniel Robinson, went missing just a few months before Gabby Petito. He was last seen leaving a job site in Buckeye, Arizona on June 23, 2021. Daniel had moved to Arizona for a job as a field geologist after he graduated from college.

At the time that he went missing, he was driving a blue-gray Jeep Renegade. According to the Buckeye Police Department, his damaged Jeep was found in a desert ravine on July 19th, a little less than a month after he was last seen. Police said that his clothes, his cell phone, wallet, and keys were found at the scene, and that foul play was not suspected given the state of his car. Nearly two years later, Daniel Robinson is still missing. We are not naive to believe that every missing person's case will get national media coverage.

That's Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation. It's a nonprofit dedicated to bringing attention to the cases of missing persons of color, like David's son, Daniel. I recently spoke with both David Robinson II and Natalie Wilson. David, I want to start with you. First of all, I'm just so sorry to hear about your son, but I want to learn more about him. Can you just start by telling us a little bit about Daniel as a person?

Yes, Daniel, he's the youngest of his three other siblings, he has a twin sister and an older brother. He's missing his right hand. Growing up with that, some may call it a disability. Daniel did things differently to show it's not. For instance, Daniel taught himself how to play a French horn. You know, he taught himself how to play the trumpet. He also, growing up, decided to get into geology.

Once he graduated from high school, going to the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Not only did he graduate in geology, but he excelled. He graduated with honors. He's also a founder for his local fraternity. So the thing is, what I'm saying about Daniel, he's a person that's a go-getter. He sets his mind to something. He actually do it. At the same time, his personality defines him.

His friendly atmosphere. He brings people together. He has tons of friends. He brings the family together. Anytime there's conflict, he's right there. So that's Daniel. And as we mentioned, Daniel's been missing since 2021. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened and when you found out that he was missing?

First thing we're thinking, you need to go to check his apartment and make sure he's not there, you know, or he's just not answering his phone, that type stuff. And we was able to rule out that he wasn't answering his phone. So of course, the next step was to try to get law enforcement to do a welfare check. So it started off that way. Things progressed from that point, just knowing my son, his patterns. He wouldn't go six hours. I realized it was over six hours at the time. He wouldn't go that long without letting his family, friends, someone know what he's doing that day. So that was very suspicious to us from that point. That's when I was able to try to reach out to law enforcement in Arizona. Natalie, I want to bring you in here.

Can you tell us why people of color and particularly Black people make up such a large share of those who go missing? We're finding that people are disappearing for a number of reasons. One, sex trafficking, especially during the pandemic. We have seen an uptick in those cases of our children being online and communicating with individuals that they think are their age. They're meeting up with them. So sex trafficking is an issue that is happening in our communities. It's not just happening abroad. mental health challenges, domestic violence against women. And we're also seeing our senior population wandering away from their home because of dementia or Alzheimer's. But we also started the organization because missing people of color were just under the

radar. They're not getting the same level of media coverage or law enforcement resources. Nine out of the 10 cases that we receive when there's a missing minor, law enforcement tend to classify that child as a runaway. So they're classified as a runaway. They do not receive the Amber Alert and they

definitely don't receive any type of media coverage at all. And as a result, they remain missing four times longer than any other group. So what we're trying to do is to even the playing field, we're not asking for anything special. We just want to make sure that our missing are household names, too. I mean, I want to ask you both about this point. Natalie Holloway, who disappeared back in 2005 but is still a household name, the more recent case of Gabby Petito. These are stories that riveted the nation that got primetime coverage. There were news stories on programs including NPR about those cases. What do you think the role of the media is here? I mean, why do you think cases like those get such a different treatment than cases like Daniel's? What we're finding as we're speaking to individuals or reporters at news stations, there are no policies in place to determine who gets coverage. So if you get two calls at a news station, who decides who gets that coverage?

And it's typically a news editor. It's a middle-aged white man and may not see the value in telling the story of that missing individual from a marginalized community. So we have to also change the narrative that these are our missing mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Let's humanize these missing individuals. David, I want to ask you about your experience in navigating that media ecosystem as you advocated for help for finding your son, Daniel. What was that like for you? And what do you think about the way that Black men, Black people who go missing are treated compared to their white counterparts? My experience trying to get my son's name, to simply get his name out

there, it was very hard. It took me three months just to get local news organization to... Three months? Yes. Yes. Three months just to get a story out there. I reached out to the news stations, the radio stations, trying everything I can day and night, up day and night, writing letters just to get coverage. It was very difficult.

What were the kinds of things you heard when you were reaching out to reporters or news stations to try to get his name and his case and, frankly, his face out there? What did they say to you? Well, you know, one of the biggest problems is my son, he's an adult to many. To me, he's a child. And I think what happens when I talk to a lot of individuals like the reporters, news stations, I'm often hearing things like he's an adult. Buckeye Police Department say he's a grown man. Maybe he just left and want to be away. So those are things of contradictory to the things that I know about my son. And so those problem matters, just trying to make sure people understood that Daniel didn't come from a place where he needed to just go disappear or he wanted to be away from his family.

I mean, your story is unfortunately one that is all too common across this country, particularly when we're talking about missing people of color. I'm curious to both of you, how do we make this experience better so that fewer people of color who go missing stay missing, so that their families have the resources they need? I mean, we have amber alerts for missing children. There are silver alerts for missing elders that we get on our phones. Should there be a similar system for missing people? There should be an alert system, a public communication alert system for people of color. But I will say that right now there are two alert systems, one for minors and one for seniors. And most people who are reported missing don't fall into that category.

So the media and social media platforms are not being alerted of their disappearance. And Minnesota Representative Ruth Richardson has had legislation passed so that Black women and girls can be protected. And now California is also trying to pass legislation to enhance or improve the public communications alert system with an ebony alert. But I also want to add, and David can expound on this a bit, he had to raise funds to get the basic resources, and we assisted him with this, to help find his son, whether it was drones or the search party.

And typically, law enforcement with taxpayer dollars would help with that search. But David, and we see this all the time with families, they have to raise funds on their own to help find their missing loved one. David, anything you want to add there? Yes, it's just painful just hearing that. And it's true. One of the things I've relied on is law enforcement to, my vision was them walking side by side with me to search for my son. I was able to do over 48 weeks of searches.

And it was really rough not having law enforcement's presence there, having to, I'm a person that has a lot of pride. So I had to go out to the community to ask for funding, just to keep searches going, just to get out flyers and things like that. And I thank the Black and Missing Foundation for their help, but I was looking for law enforcement to do so. It's very painful to literally be a grown man and beg law enforcement to help, and the help don't ever come. David, it'll be two years this month since Daniel went missing. What you're describing sounds agonizing for any parent. My heart really breaks for you. I have to ask you, what keeps you going after all this time? How do you keep doing this? Well, the only thing I have is God. God, He's the strength of my life, of course. My love for my son. He's my youngest son. My son don't give up on anything. I'm definitely

not giving up on him. I also rely on my military training. We're trained to never leave a fallen comrade, never leaving the one behind. My son is Daniel, Daniel Robinson. I'm definitely not leaving him behind. I've learned to make finding my son my mission, my life mission. You know, you put the mission first, and that's what I'm doing. So to keep going, I try to make sure I just focus on everything, focus on everything that I've learned and try to make sure I stay focused on finding my son and do that without fail. That was David Robinson II.

His son, Daniel Robinson, is still missing. You also heard from Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation. This episode also includes reporting from NPR's Jonathan Franklin. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

Kauffman.org Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org.