I agree that it isn’t simply a class issue, but also a racial one (though the race at issue varies by country - I’m Canadian, and up here the concern is over missing Aboriginal women, moreso than Blacks; that’s simply a result of a different history).
What I think is that the racial disparity will, over time, be addressed, but the class one will not.
We can look forward to a future in which the media goes equally gaga over missing pretty upper middle class Black women (in the US) and Aboriginal women (in Canada) as it currenty does over missing pretty upper middle class White women.
The lack of poor and ugly people in the media doesn’t explain the gross underrepresentation of minorities, though. Of course I know they aren’t saying black victims don’t disappear. Rather, they are suggesting black and Hispanic victims don’t get attention because “white crackwhores don’t either!” and “ugly and poor white people don’t either!” The implication is that non-minorities don’t get attention because they are ugly ghetto druggies. Coincidentally these same kind of assumptions account for racial profiling and discrimination in the workplace. The casual way in which these adjectives are associated with being non-white is quite revealing. It is something to pay attention to.
Just wondering what makes you think it is inevitable this racial disparity issue will be addressed? I think the racial bias we’re talking about is as deeply entrenched as the racial bias that causes racial disparities in law enforcement, and neither have shown signs of becoming extinct on their own.
The phenomenon is actually a vicious cycle and thus, is not the kind of thing breaks down without a critical mass committed to fighting against it. Not excusing it or shrugging it off, but calling it problem and talking about it in a critical, introspective manner.
Nah, I was just covering my bases because some nitpicker would say if a pretty black girl went missing then the media would be all over it. Like a light skinned black model or something. Or maybe that has happened and the media didn’t give two shits either, I dunno. I do know that lots of white guys don’t find black women attractive in general, so if the media hook is attractiveness then it makes sense for the media to ignore them. It’s all about the ratings and appealing to white people.
Is there a hierarchy of important missing women in American media? Does it go, let me guess, white, Asian, Hispanic (light to dark), then black? Or is it pretty much white or go home?
I think it will be addressed because it does not square with the ideology of our society - it invokes a sense of deep unfairness.
In part, the history of America is the history of struggle against the reality of racial discrimination in the face of an ideology of human worth (the leading example of course being the contrast between the high sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the reality that the people who drafted it were slave-owners: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is simply odd comming from absolute owners of humans, as was noted by some at the time); the trajectory over time has always been to gradually progress in eliminating that disparity. Hence, Blacks are no longer slaves, no longer subject to “Jim Crow” laws; what is left is the intrenched institutional problems, and those ingrained in the culture, which are naturally taking longer to remove.
On the other hand, class differences are more deeply entrenched: such inequality is simply basic to our type of society (I am using the term “our” in the inclusive, North American sense) in a way that racial differences are not; treating people from different classes differently does not pose a disconnect between ideology and reality, or invoke any sense of deep unfairness. Indeed, treating an upper-middle class Black better than a poor White is seen as an affirmation of societies’ values; the reverse, as obnoxious evidence of racism (and “the same” as simply utopian unreality). This is unlikely to change, unless society becomes radically different.
And yet just one post above yours, there’s an unapologetic defense for racial discrimination in the media. So whatever sense of deep unfairness all of this is supposed to invoke in us, I have yet to really see that naturally arise among the white majority.
History has shown that for this “sense of deep unfairness” to occur, someone has to actually make white people see the unfairness. Otherwise, their natural impulse is to excuse it, pretend it doesn’t exist, or defend it as right and rational.
In other words, it’s not something that just happens “over time”. It takes work.
Ignoring people simply because they don’t give white men boners doesn’t make sense to me and even if it did make sense, that doesn’t make the issue non-problematic. So your appeal to “what makes sense” ultimately represents a defense of the status quo, not a challenge.
And newsflash: white men are not the arbiters of attractiveness either.
White women mean more ratings. And like you said it’s impossible to cover every missing person. So, isnt it better to try and publicize a few missing females and maybe have them found, than it is to have no missing persons found?
But I’m not actually defending it. It’s an odd charge to accuse me of not offering a challenge to the system. I don’t see you offering solutions for reforming a racist society or its institutions. I wouldn’t expect one though, it’s a tall order.
Who is then? They control most Western media, and many people try to look more white. Heck, Asians get eye surgery to look more Western. The elites in many black and Hispanic countries are light skinned, and their beauty pageant contestants and models are often light skinned women. So there’s either cultural imperialism going on, which is pretty standard lib thought, or everyone decided collectively that white women are the bomb. The latter would be harder to change, since it would mean it’s personal preference instead of cultural programming.
This is somewhat tangential to the “white girl vs. black girl” question, I admit, but I can’t agree with the premise here. When the Founding Fathers said things like “All men are created equal”, they were talking about class, not race. Sure, there were people at the time who despised slavery, and John Adams even criticized the same hypocrisy we see in Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, writing those words. So I don’t claim that none of them were giving race any thought. But the main idea was that the class distinctions of the Old World, where some people were naturally laborers and others naturally aristocrats, were in fact unnatural and shouldn’t exist in a just society.
From the very beginning, the great myth of American society has been that we don’t have class distinctions. Anyone from any background can work hard and become rich, unlike the socially rigid societies of the Old World where your bloodlines determine who gets to be rich. We don’t value wealthy people more than we value the poor because we recognize that we were all created equal, unlike in the Old World where everyone assumes aristocrats are innately a higher form of being. These ideas aren’t exactly true, and never really have been. But the reality that we let a person’s tax bracket, if not their actual bloodline, decide where they stand in the social hierarchy of who is important or interesting enough to pay attention to is, I feel, a severe disconnect with our ideological claim to be a classless society with full social mobility.
What they were against was not class (they certainly considered themselves to be of a higher class than, say, as many labourers), but the notion of immutable classes without the possibility of social mobility.
Hence the ideology developed that, in the perfect state of society, one could achieve the “class” one deserved by one’s own efforts and abilities - not that, once obtained in this manner, an upper-class person should be treated with the same deference as a lower-class person. Quite the opposite! Assuming the ideology was true in reality, an upper-class person deserved to be treated with more deference and attention - after all, he or she presumptively obtained that distinction through hard work, thrift, intelligence, etc.
Hence, according to this ideology, it is an offence and an affront to treat a low-class White with more deference and attention than a high-class Black.
Certainly the founding fathers were “not talking about race”. The point is that the ideology of equality could not logically be confined to mere issue of social mobility among Whites. The logic of this inherent contracdiction is brought into stark relief by the existence of upper-middle-class Blacks.
Don’t get me started on how much I despise victim impact statements during the penalty phase of death penalty trials. How much a victim was loved, and how cute he or she was as a baby is all used to try to push for a death sentence.
Yeah, but if one of the Obamas’ daughters went missing, it would be 24-hour coverage everywhere. It would be the biggest news story since 9/11. Class, and other family factors of the victim are part of it.
I always wished for the brown-haired baby doll I could nevr find in the stores-- they weren’t just white, they were all blonde. But it never made me wish to be blonde; in fact, it made me kind of defensive about having dark hair and eyes. But I really do think that dark hair is more attractive than blonde hair, I really do.
I’ve gotta go, but there’s an interesting side note about one of the “pretty white women” on the list, because I lived in the town where she lived, and went to the same school. She was Jewish, and there was some interesting anti-Semitic backlash against the initial coverage of her disappearance, which, if it’s compared to the disappearance of a gentile woman in the same town about six years earlier, is revealing.
Yeah you are, by shrugging it off as something that makes sense.
As I pointed out earlier, it would help if we could stop being in denial about or excusing this issue. As long as people keep rationalizing the status quo or treating discrimination as the normal course of doing business in America, reform will never happen.
If your point is that white men are racially biased and this bias is reflected in the media, then…no duh. Saying this isn’t an explanation; it’s basically like saying racism occurs because those in power are racist.
Race aside, almost half the population is heterosexual women. Race *not *aside, are you really trying to tell me that beauty is not appreciated in women that aren’t white? That a young woman like the one in the article I linked to is unattractive using the heterosexual white male rubric? Hogwash. Yes, the Euro standard of beauty is a thing, but there is diversity in tastes out there. Its kind of sad this needs to be pointed out.
But let’s suppose that white men are the center of the media universe. As a demographic, white men are a minority in a society that is becoming more diverse every day, so it doesn’t make sense for us to blithely accept a media that caters to them. This setup doesn’t make any more “sense” than the fact that some demographics are worth ignoring more than others by dint of race. All of it is a product of racism, either historical or current.
This was never this case, sorry. History is clear on this. In Jim Crow south, for instance, the poorest of whites could still sit at the lunch counter, ride at the front of bus, and attend the best schools (if they had a scholarship). The richest of blacks could do none of these things.
Yes, and this situation was an offence and an affront to the ideology that America prides itself on. Which is exactly why it is no longer the case today.
Without it being an offence and an affront, the civil rights movement would never have gained any traction. If this situation was not a “contradiction”, it would have petered out to general indifference - much like the occupy Wall Street protests did. The difference, of course, is that Occupy could not hold up some sort of essential contradiction to America, in the same way that the civil rights movement could - which is why the former succeeded and the latter failed.
Lol. This is craziness. The ideology you’re talking about has never existed, dude. Your insistence on this is embarrassing, so now I have to ask you put up some cites or something.
If this ideology of which you speak is so powerful, so ingrained in the fabric of America history, how in the hell did slavery flourish so prolifically under it’s shroud? Requiring, in fact, a war to abolish it? If what you say is true, how did we have a race-based apartheid but we have yet to see anything like that for class? Did Americans get possessed by demons or something? What accounts for this racist history, if not for a white supremacist ideology?
If classism has been a more socially acceptable vice than racism, why have we had several Presidents from impoverished backgrounds (like Clinton), but it took us almost 150 years before we had a President that is not a white male?
More craziness! The Civil Rights Movement existed only because the prevailing ideology (white supremacy) was oppressive. It gained traction because a critical mass of people started to realize this ideology was wrong and needed changing.
This ideology still exists. It taints pretty much everything; it just not as blatant as it was in the past.