Do women of color ever go missing?

This article, taken from Black Agenda Report, reminds me of the media apartheid when it comes to the disappearance of women of color. Every year, we there are multiple stories on white females who disappear, such as Natalie Holloway, Stacey Peterson, and Laci Peterson, but I can’t remember the last time I ever saw a missing black or lLtina female featured on national news, can you?

Prized Possessions: Media Politics and Missing Women

by Sikivu Hutchinson

In a nation of 300 million that’s half-female, only a select group is entitled to rank among the high-profile “missing,” should they disappear. “In the national ‘victim-ocracy,’ small town, suburban and/or university affiliated white women get the most play as valued human interest subjects and cultural possessions.” Skin and class privilege are highly relevant, even if (or especially if) you’ve vanished from sight.

Prized Possessions: Media Politics and Missing Women

by Sikivu Hutchinson

“Location, race and gender play a pivotal role in the media’s fixation on missing person stories.”

When the L.A. Times runs a story on a missing black woman on the front page of its local features section it stimulates inquiring minds. How, in the super-charged climate of breathless cable news reports on Jaycee, Elizabeth Smart and their white sisterhood could such a feat of journalistic subversion be possible? In mid-September of this year 24 year-old Mitrice Richardson, an African American woman from South Los Angeles, went missing after being released from a Calabasas, California jail. Richardson had been arrested for apparently refusing to pay the tab for a meal she ate at a Malibu restaurant. Prior to the arrest, restaurant personnel and witnesses reported that she was behaving erratically and gave the appearance of being mentally ill. After authorities found marijuana in her car they arrested her on charges of “defrauding an innkeeper” and possession.

The Times chronicled the massive search made for Richardson by friends, relatives and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The story was also picked up by local news and has outraged African Americans nationwide. Questions swirl around the County Sheriff’s conduct in both the arrest and release of Richardson. Why, for example, was she not placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold (a common practice when dealing with mentally ill “suspects”) when detained? And why, after being released from jail was she sent off into the dead of night in a remote area without a cell phone or vehicle? Families of missing and abducted people of color organize tirelessly to generate any shred of coverage they can get from the media in “post-racial” America. Tired of the media’s ritual indifference to the lives of black women in their community, the mothers of missing women in Edgecombe County in North Carolina launched a billboard campaign called MOMS (Missing or Murdered Sisters) to advertise a slew of suspected abductions and murders of black women in their area. So what distinguishes Richardson’s case from that of the scores of other missing and abducted people of color which seldom score even a few lines buried in a big city newspaper? Location is apparently the only factor that would warrant such an aberration.

“Families of missing and abducted people of color organize tirelessly to generate any shred of coverage they can get from the media in “post-racial” America.”

The Malibu sightings of Richardson were evidently so jarring for local white residents that they elicited instant recollection from those reported to have seen her. Unlike other missing person cases tainted by the urban “grit” of South Los Angeles and other communities of color where crime is perceived to be the cultural norm, the crime free veneer of an almost exclusively white community in which “it’s strange to see a black woman walking in the (Malibu) canyon,” is the subtext. Location, race and gender play a pivotal role in the media’s fixation on missing person stories. In the national “victim-ocracy,” small town, suburban and/or university affiliated white women get the most play as valued human interest subjects and cultural possessions. The endless media loop of search parties, dragged lakes, crack of dawn patrols and tearful living room pleas from grieving family members only lodge in the public imagination as national pathos when “our” little hometown girls are at stake. As exceptions to the rule, Richardson’s case—coupled with the more prominent example of slain Vietnamese-American Yale University student Annie Le—illustrates the extent to which location can obscure the regime of white privilege and entitlement that frames the stories and lives deemed most valuable by the mainstream media.

“Small town, suburban and/or university affiliated white women get the most play as valued human interest subjects.”

Centered in a bastion of Ivy League power and privilege nestled uneasily in the racially segregated city of New Haven, the Le case garnered national attention in spite of Le’s ethnic background. As a member of the academic elite, Le represented a student body potentially imperiled by the urban dangers of crime-ridden housing “projects” and other undesirable areas. And as with any good colonialist private university regime (e.g., the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California) hellbent on takeover of the “ghetto,” these untamed areas naturally sully a city’s cosmopolitan aspirations. Once it was discovered that Le was murdered by a white insider, and not an encroaching racial Other, the tabloid cable news mafia modulated its budding hysteria and moved on.

Clearly the racist “model minority” myth and the promotion of the docile, assimilable Asian stereotype make Asian Americans more palatable to mainstream white society than African Americans. Le and Richardson’s backgrounds are dissimilar save for their being young women of color. Yet take away Le’s Yale pedigree and they would be “united” as victims of the mainstream media’s hierarchy of the disposable. For it is utterly certain that the mainstream media would not have deviated from its nationally sanctioned script of victimized white women if either Le or Richardson had gone missing in South L.A. or the “gritty” streets of New Haven.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for Some of Us Are Brave, KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.

For more information on MOMS: http://essentialpresence.blogspot.com/2009/07/moms-group-puts-up-billboard-to-give.html

The Quagmire of Failed Black Interdependence

Black Interdependence

Today, I’m a featured blogger at Black Conscious Thought.  Black Conscious thought is a blog written by a fiery, young, black woman named Von.  She has some interesting work over there.

Check out the article here: The Quagmire of Failed Black Interdependence.

Derrion Albert: the latest victim in Chicago’s youth massacre

Derrion Albert, 14-years-old

massacre [mas-uh-ker]

-noun
1. the unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a large number of human beings, as in barbarous warfare or persecution or for revenge or plunder.

2. a general slaughter, as of persons or animals.

3. Informal. a crushing defeat.

I would love to write with hope that Derrion’s untimely, tragic murder will lift Chicagoan’s consciousness and incite a movement of justice and outrage, but I know better. Derrion’s name will find its place amongst the other martyrs of urban violence—wedged between Bell and Diallo.

Chicago suffered 509 murders in 2008 and while the police department is reporting a 3-4% drop in 2009, they are still poised to reach 500 again. If Chicago had New York’s population and the same murder rate, it easily reaches more than 1,200 murders—a number a modern US has not come close to since New York’s 1980’s narcotics wars or the height of Los Angeles’s gang wars.

Derrion did the things the right way. He was successful in his academics, was adored by his peers, and, reportedly, got involved in the melee trying to help a friend who was in trouble. How can we possibly encourage our children to follow the difficult path when this is so often the result? And how should communities of color respond differently to this type of violence? It’s clear that relying on elected officials and public agencies has failed our youth to date.

Rick Warren encourages Christians to follow Jesus like Germans followed Hitler

Rick Warren gave this  speech back in 2005 to over 30,000 Saddleback Church members in a packed sports stadium. In it, he goes through and talks about how people followed Hitler, Lenin, and Chairman Mao, in fanatical ways to make “change” in their respective nations, and how he wants Christians to follow Jesus (through him of course) in the same way. If you don’t believe me, just check out the video:

The last time that people were that fanatical about Christianity, the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition happened, as well as the extermination of the Native Americans. That’s not really the best type of history I would like to see repeated, but it seems to be along the lines of what Warren is calling for.

Adrenaline: A Nation Under Attack.

Black Family Embrace

The oneness theory and its essence become ever more fascinating as you elucidate how it fuses into many levels of reality. An instance of this is the human body.  When things in life are patterned after the design of the body, the body is then able to present effective solutions to problems with a similar context.

Like how architecture is essentially modeled after the human body (the skeletal, circulatory and nervous systems), we can learn a few lessons from the function of adrenaline.

Adrenaline (epinephrine) is a chemical released by the adrenal glands when your body senses or detects stress. Adrenaline gives a mother who has seen her child pinned under a massive object the strength to remove it with relative ease.

“When we feel fear or are faced with a sudden dangerous situation, the human body undergoes an amazing change.” – Josh Clark, HowStuffWorks.com

Upon the emission of this substance, the muscles can contract beyond their normal capacity.  The heart rate of the body increases, respiration increases, pupils dilate and digestion is significantly reduced.  In the process, the body is capable of utilizing more energy.

“Why don’t we walk around in a constant heightened state of agitation? The short answer is, it would kill us,” says Josh Clark. If the body is using greater energy, than it must be taking a toll on the body as a whole.  The law of conservation states that energy is neither created nor destroyed but transforms.

According to HowStuffWorks.com, the adrenal response system undergoes three major stages.  The first stage is the alarm reaction; this is when your body detects danger and begins to enter a fight-or-flight mode.  The second stage is the stage of resistance, where your body’s defense mechanisms are heightened.  The third stage is the state of exhaustion.  In the state of exhaustion the body’s immune defenses are down and the body is more susceptible to illnesses, like catching a cold.  If the body is over agitated for a prolonged period of time it can also suffer a heart attack.

How does this relate to a nation?  Black individuals and black people as a collective are under attack.  Our communities are heavily stressed.  Collectively, black people are in an extremely unsavory and precarious condition.

In this case, as a collective and subsequently individually, black people must work in overdrive to balance an external imbalance.  This is essentially means sacrifice.  The body innately knows sacrifice when it produces a condition where it sacrifices the health of its organs for a temporary gain in strength to fend off its enemies.  Everything God does follows the principles of Ma’at.  Scientists describe a fraction of Ma’at as homeostasis.  Ma’at has everything to do with balance (and more).  When the body is presented with an external force that perturbs its calmness, its tranquility or balance, the body must balance this external force by utilizing an internal force.  The body enters a perturbed state provoking the release of adrenaline, which then evokes a greater supply of energy to the body, drawing energy from nonessential body functions for which your body has called a moratorium on.

Black men and woman can reflect on the wisdom of God in the design of the body to realize that sometimes you must sacrifice your state of calmness to achieve a level of success, a level of safety.  You must make yourself uncomfortable for a while to provide yourself and your progeny a state of true tranquility.

Black people’s health is already taking a toll because of the nature of adrenaline.  The daily stress blacks feel triggers adrenal gland activity (especially because of higher spiritual sensory abilities provided by greater concentrations of melanin).  This gradual, consistent emission of adrenaline taxes our organs causing them premature failure, high blood pressure and other stress-induced diseases.

Our bodies feel the stress.  Our bodies respond to the stress.  But because we have been mis-educated and more importantly mis-politicized, we fail to correctly identify our enemies.  Thus we squander our ability to exercise this greater potential created by conditions of stress, ultimately leading to taxing our organs to the point of death and demise.