After seeing a commercial for a lifetime movie on the missing girl Natalie Holloway I recalled how many girls are missing an
d the constant news stories on them that have become like a nation wide soap opera. Over the years girls like Elizabeth Smart, JonBenét Ramsey, Madeline McCann and countless others have broken hearts across America due to their disappearances. I researched that around 800,000 children go missing every year so I wonder what makes these children get the national media spotlight as opposed to the 100,000’s of others. Throughout my life I do not remember seeing a missing black little girl’s face being plastered all over the national news. The message the media sends when they forget to cover a missing black girl from Harlem and instead spend all their attention on a missing white girl from an upper middle class family is that the white girl’s life has more value. It is distressing to see that missing minorities do not get as much media coverage as they deserve when in reality there are more missing minorities than Caucasians. The identity unit in class reminds me to ask if “there is any part of who I am that seems to be in conflict with society and its dominant narrative?” The answer for most students at New Trier could quite possibly be no, because the Caucasian narrative is common in the media. There is a different answer for minorities because the lives of their young don’t even seem to be recognized by American mainstream culture.
d the constant news stories on them that have become like a nation wide soap opera. Over the years girls like Elizabeth Smart, JonBenét Ramsey, Madeline McCann and countless others have broken hearts across America due to their disappearances. I researched that around 800,000 children go missing every year so I wonder what makes these children get the national media spotlight as opposed to the 100,000’s of others. Throughout my life I do not remember seeing a missing black little girl’s face being plastered all over the national news. The message the media sends when they forget to cover a missing black girl from Harlem and instead spend all their attention on a missing white girl from an upper middle class family is that the white girl’s life has more value. It is distressing to see that missing minorities do not get as much media coverage as they deserve when in reality there are more missing minorities than Caucasians. The identity unit in class reminds me to ask if “there is any part of who I am that seems to be in conflict with society and its dominant narrative?” The answer for most students at New Trier could quite possibly be no, because the Caucasian narrative is common in the media. There is a different answer for minorities because the lives of their young don’t even seem to be recognized by American mainstream culture. 