Missing, But Not Missed Series 4 Canvas Print – 54″ x 72″ (Stretched with Floating Frame)

Description

In America, narratives sometimes swell and fall with the tides of attention. When she meets the profile, a missing child becomes a national crisis. A mother’s tears fill news stories when they fit the correct demographic. But for many missing Black girls in America, their disappearances hardly disturb the surface of public consciousness. They vanish, yet somehow they are not missed.

Data from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) indicates that in 2023 alone, more than 97,000 Black women and girls were reported missing in the United States. Though Black people only make up 13.6% of the U.S. population, that’s about one-third of all missing person cases. This troubling number highlights a long-standing problem in Black communities that frequently goes ignored.

Of those, young Black girls between the ages of 12 and 17 are particularly susceptible. A survey from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found that Black girls are often adultified—seen as older and less innocent than their white counterparts. Law enforcement becomes less sympathetic as a result, and their cases are more likely to be categorized as runaways, which get less media attention and postpone probes.

Scholars and activists have coined the term “Missing White Woman Syndrome” to describe this inequality: the media’s propensity to give missing white women and girls undue attention while ignoring incidents involving Black and Brown girls. A 2010 research by Scripps Howard News Service revealed that in missing person instances, white women get 10 times more media attention than Black women.

This systematic erasure has catastrophic effects. Ignoring Black missing people leaves communities exposed and strengthens predators. Missing Black females lose their humanity when they are treated as numbers instead of narratives. This silence lets a false narrative survive: that Black females either deserve their victimization or are not worth looking for.

But what is lost when a Black girl disappears? Not only a daughter, a sister, or a friend. What is gone is Black girlhood, future leaders, inventiveness, love, and heritage. Everyone is a future that never blossoms—a poet, scientist, mother, and voice that could have changed the world. And far too often, their vanishings stay unresolved.

We have to call for change. That calls for increasing the efforts of organizations like the Black and Missing Foundation, which struggles every day to give voice to the missing Black women and girls excluded from national news. It means asking media sources to cover missing Black children equally and pushing police to handle all missing people with the urgency they merit.

Being “missing but not missed” is a terrible accusation of our culture. Yet, we have the power to change the narrative. Every Black girl should know that her life counts. Her voice counts. Should she ever vanish, loudly, unrelentingly, and publicly, she will be hunted for, discussed, and battled for.

Silence is complicity; apathy is violence.