Power
"I can tell you right now, there are no secrets. There's no mystery. Yjere's only common sense."
-- Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper; quoted from page 64 of "Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders, by Harvey Arden.
I saw a news report, I think on ABC, that focused on the national media's paying more attention to missing white women with blonde hair, than to missing non-white women. I was encouraged by the thoughtful report. I learned a few things, such as that FBI statistics showed that in 2020, 540,000+ people -- including 340,000+ juveniles -- went missing.
Of course, many of these missing people were found alive. That's good. But a lot of them were found dead, and that's bad. And far too many are never found. These groups include a wide range of human beings, although for this discussion, I'd like to remain focused on women. While "missing women" is not a new dynamic in our country, it is an uncomfortable measure of social pathology.
If we were to look at one house in the United States -- let's use the Laundrie home, as a handy example -- where a woman has gone missing as Gabby Petito did, we can identify that there is what we used to call "dysfunction" when I was a social worker. If a community has a hiigh rate of women going missing, we know it has serious problems. And if a country has significant rates of women going missing, it is a pathology that decays the nation-state's social fabric.
Now, good people agree that each case is important. It shouldn't matter what color their skin or hair is, any more than how tall they are, or their favorite flavor of ice cream. Yet there is a dynamic, particularly in the national media, that Gwen Ifill called the "missing white woman syndrome." Charlton McIlwain has noted that this dynamic imposes and reinforces a racial hierarchy in American culture. And while statistics document that federal and state officials are aware of the large number of missing women. What statistics cannot document is how seriously investigators take each case.
This morning, I watched a clip from a right-wing Australian news agency reporting on the Gabby Petito case. The three white reporters were more than indignant -- outrage doesn't fully describe it -- that some American reporters had noted that there isn't national coverage of missing non-white women that compares to "missing white woman syndrome." They highlighted two black journalists who had commented on this -- one from MSNBC, the other from CNN. They demanded that the two apologize to Gabby's family, completely unaware that they were exposing their own bias.
I take a particular interest in missing Native American women, if only because they are ten times more likely to "go missing" than are others. More, I'm old enough to remember when, in one state with a large Native American population, a white man would only be charged with a misdemeanor for raping a female on Indian territory. That state remains a conservative, primarily republican stronghold, with a governor opposed to science. In talking to a number of older Native women, they mentioned that VICE provides some good coverage:
https://www.vice.com/en/topic/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women
Another sent me this:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/all-out-search-media-attention-gabby-petito-reveals-glaring-disparity-n1279980?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR1nCT6E93Lw87iCWkBdvBzD50NEGfb3G4GUlVBCdMf3SIVLeKuGta5yxlg
It's not a competition to identify who is more or less important. It is a struggle to create a safer, better society. To paraphrase Albert Camus, maybe we can't end all the pathology that damages our culture, but perhaps we can lessen the number of victims who suffer. The starting point is to learn just how wide-spread it is for women to go missing in 2021. If Gabby Petito's case is to find full meaning, it will be in the expansion of the collective consciousness of the American public.
What do I mean by collective consciousness? The example I used in conversation with my daughter today involves building a foundation. If one person is good with a back how, another with mixing cement, another with laying blocks, another with installing proper drainage outside the walls, and another at filling in along those walls, their collective talents build a strong foundation by coordinating their efforts. Each contributes according to their talents. The result is solid enough to then build a sturdy house on top.
To deal with our culture's missing women pathology -- or, as we were reminded by the mass shooting in Tennessee, the other social pathologies -- it demands that people at the grass roots level become active participants. Law enforcement often becomes involved after it is too late, as I know from numerous brutal cases that two of my uncles solved. Politicians must play a role, but I will end with another quote from "Wisdomkeepers," from Tadodaho Leon Shenandoah, when asked about the greatest power (pagec 104):
"I myself have no power. It's the people behind me who have the power."
That means you.
Peace,
H2O Man