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Where Are America’s 64,000 Missing Black Women?
We need to discuss a sad and disturbing trend that is occurring in the United States. It might be something you’ve already noticed, but it’s something many people have never stopped to consider. When a white woman goes missing, the story is all over the news. However, when a black woman goes missing, the public barely hears a peep.
Don’t believe me? There’s actually a term for this: Missing White Woman Syndrome. The phrase was coined by the late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill. It refers to Americans’ insatiable hunger for information about cases involving missing white women like Natalie Holloway and Susan Powell, and their disinterest in stories involving missing women of color.
Yes, racism is alive and well in the United States. What else could explain this discrepancy? Is it that black women simply don’t go missing? Well, white women go missing more often than black women, but women of color still go missing at an alarming rate. And as you will see, the rate of female African-American disappearances is shockingly high in relation to the number of black women living in the U.S.
According to the Black and Missing Foundation, 64,000 black women and girls were missing in 2014. What’s the deal? Why are so many women of color disappearing off the face of the earth? One theory is a resurgence in slavery. The plantations and cotton fields may be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean that slavery no longer exists. Take the example of Bobby Paul Edwards, the South Carolina man who enslaved a disabled black man in the restaurant he owned.
Edwards forced the man to work about 104 hours a week with no pay under the threat of violence. Edwards physically assaulted the man regularly while hurling racial epithets at him. Now, this case didn’t involve a woman, but the point is, there still exists an underbelly of racist Americans so hateful towards black people that they would willingly enslave them.
Another theory is that black women are being snatched off the streets and used for organ harvesting. The most realistic theory, though, is that these women are being sold into human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking. (No, human trafficking doesn’t just involve the sex trade.)
