A search for missing American teen Natalee Holloway--
The disappearance and death of Washington intern Chandra Levy--
And while Gabby Petito’s disappearance
has been making headlines for weeks--
It’s prompting many to wonder
why the stories of missing and murdered women of color
don’t receive as much airtime.
My heart goes out to Miss Gabby.
But what about Rajah [McQueen]?
There are other girls that went missing around the same time,
and I don’t hear their name in the press.
I grew up just watching the stories of missing and murdered women
taking over news cycles.
But I did notice, even as a kid, that not many of those stories
had girls and women that look like me.
There is an underrepresentation of Black women and women of color.
These are actually people.
This is someone’s child, someone’s mom.
-What do we want? -Justice!
-When do we want it? -Now!
A Black woman is murdered, and it takes Black people
or people of color within the community
to kind of raise hell before anybody really pays attention.
-We walk for who? -We walk for her!
I really wanted to do something that would leave an imprint
and help my community as well,
and so I just stepped in the gap.
My name is Erika Marie,
and I run the website Our Black Girls.
[Super_Users]
[Highlighting Missing Black Women]
I founded a website
where I share stories of missing and murdered Black women
that go underrepresented in mainstream media.
So, I share as much as I can about their lives,
and I’m making things go viral
and forcing the hand of mainstream media
to pay attention to just who we are and what we’re going through.
I’m a journalist. I work in hip hop and music
and celebrity entertainment, pop culture.
But from midnight to maybe 3:30 to 4:00 in the morning,
I'm researching more stories.
I'm looking through government databases, newspaper archives.
I do all of that outside of my career.
There’s an overrepresentation in media when white women go missing
and an underrepresentation in media
when Black, brown, and Indigenous women go missing.
It actually has a name, “missing white woman syndrome,”
to describe the media and public fascination with missing white women
while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.
I typically start either with the government database,
the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
It’s a vast database but definitely does not have everyone in it.
And I also start with the Doe Network.
They have a lot of cases of identified persons
that date back decades and decades.
They have medical examiners offices and all of that as well.
Newspaper.com is probably the largest newspaper archive,
and I’m able to dig through the trenches of information.
But those are my three main resources that I start with.
Sometimes I’ll write about a cold case
that occurred sometime in the 70s or 80s.
And then there is a little bit of movement from other platforms
that will also kind of cover that case,
and I can’t keep track of how that moves online.
I just hope something happens, and I hope people get answers,
and that’s satisfactory for me.
It can be frustrating when I see certain...
stories get more recognition than others.
The hashtag #gabbypetito
viewed over 867 million times on TikTok alone.
But here’s the despairing truth:
Gabby Petito is one of so many reported missing each year.
At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing persons cases.
45 percent of those cases— people of color.
We need to use our platform
and highlight some of these other missing person cases.
We just want Black women and women of color
to be acknowledged and brought to the awareness
at the same rate as white women.
Especially when there’s harm done to us,
and especially Black women
because we’re pretty much degraded
across everything that you could ever think of.
When you talk about dating apps, we’re the least desired.
When you talk about how we are portrayed in the media,
we're often aggressive or angry.
We're not soft and gentle and kind,
and we're not perceived to be that way.
We wear that label.
You don’t hear “angry Asian woman” or “angry white woman.”
It’s “the angry Black woman.”
There is this narrative that’s often perpetuated
that Black women or Black girls
have done something to aid in whatever they’ve experienced.
On that day, my whole world came crashing down around me,
knowing that my daughter was found lifeless in her apartment.
Last month, 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields
was found dead in her apartment
after a date with a man she had met on the dating app Bumble.
I feel like because he’s a white guy, she’s a Black girl,
it’s just almost like they’ve just thrown her under a rug.
She was portrayed in this narrative of
she was always shown in pictures wearing a bikini.
Now they’re talking about how she may have been a drug addict
because of her toxicology.
This is so troubling, Elise, because, listen,
the autopsy doesn’t show how the drugs got into her system,
so we still don’t know that,
and we are just to believe what the man says?
That night, she was silenced, so now we are her voice.
So in there, there’s frustration of trying to get the right narrative,
but at the same time, I’m no longer looking to anybody else
to figure that out and to be our voice.
When I started the website back in 2018,
I had no idea what I was doing.
I just... I built a website, and I just started writing.
The oldest case on my website is probably close to 100 years old.
And one of the earlier stories was of Isha’s mother and her sister.
Isha Miller was nine years old when her mother, Myrtle Ann Hudson,
dropped her off at school and disappeared.
Her mother is still missing.
Her sister was murdered.
And Isha was nine years old when she came home from school
and couldn’t find her sister and her mom
and searched her house with her dad and her brother,
and they found her sister hog-tied and murdered.
Mom was missing and is still missing.
The man responsible went on to harm other people.
And police pointed the finger at Isha’s father,
thus not really adequately investigating the case.
Twenty-two years later,
detectives linked the evidence to a prison inmate, Tommy Lee Stewart.
We are saying, “Hey, listen to us.”
We are writing to media outlets.
But nobody puts us on the front page.
The newest case would, of course, be Tioni Theus.
The 16-year-old was found shot to death
at the Manchester on-ramp of the 110 Freeway in South L.A.
That’s a really big case out of Los Angeles
that is finally gaining some traction in mainstream media.
Yesterday, after pressure from the community in a case growing cold,
a major development— a reward offer of more than $100,000.
When I look at my website,
I see people.
And I see all of the connections that those people have to them
and how important it is to be sensitive to that.
There is initially this sense of,
selfishly, pride in what I built...
for the sake of the greater good.