Untold Story of Missing POC

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Hello! My name is Adonai Yidnekachew. And I'm Jeremiah Cox. And we are the hosts of the ARC Deep Dive Show.

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Today's show is about the untold stories of missing people of color. We'll be diving deep into the disproportionate media coverage of white and minority missing persons cases and how when these missing POC cases are presented, they're often treated differently than cases of missing white people. Today we'll be talking about where did this issue stem from and we'll also be looking to the question how are these missing POC cases portrayed in media?

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We will also be looking at a specific missing persons case by the name of Johannes Kedon and how his case was misinterpreted by media. And we'll also be exploring what you can do to create a change in this system and make sure that more missing persons of color cases are being advocated for.

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So what is this problem and how did we end up here? Well, to provide some quick context, in the US, African-Americans account for almost 40% of the missing persons cases that are reported in the US, even though African-Americans only represent 13% of the population. So for the number of missing people cases involving people of color, it's kind of amazing that we're not constantly hearing about these cases in mainstream news media.

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Yes, and I believe that one of the points and the reasons why this problem does exist is because looking at a term that was coined by anchor Gwen Ifill called the white woman syndrome, it basically deconstructs how people of color are portrayed in media right so what this term white woman syndrome means is it's the fact that when white woman go missing the cases are heard more than people of color.

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and also how they're portrayed in media is completely different. When talking about Indigenous women, statistics show us that the homicide rate for Indigenous women is six times as high as it is for white women. Yet statistics also show us that despite this, missing Indigenous women receive 27 times less newsprint coverage, according to Harvard's political review.

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As we can see here, the homicide rate is way more higher, but they received 27 times less newsprint coverage. That means that there's something systematic going on. So let's deconstruct this. Indigenous women tend to receive less personal and less detailed coverage. Soon we'll be looking at a video that explains the white woman syndrome to us, but basically...

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It talks about how they're also portrayed in media, right? So white women's cases usually are more personal and detailed, right? And if indigenous women are presented in media, like the missing persons cases, if they are at all, they're less personal and less detailed, according to Harvard's political review, right? Media around the disappearance of white women often focuses on their roles in the community, highlighting how they were a good citizen, a good mother, a good daughter. And this causes people to sympathize with them and their families, right? And when you went sympathize with a person,

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you will be reaching out to their case way more. Conversely, the media often highlights people of color with the bias and stereotypes that people create about people of color, right? Talking about their criminal history, their drug history, or talking about maybe their dangerous living situations, if made up or if not. They try to highlight these things so we have less sympathy towards them. And because of the way that they're portrayed in media, if they are at all, these missing person cases basically don't get heard.

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because either they're portrayed in the wrong way so nobody wants to reach out to them or they're not portrayed at all as we saw from the indigenous woman statistic, right? And so this normalizes tragedy and people of color, POC communities leading to a lack of apathy and a lack of these cases being solved. So now we're gonna go transition into a three-minute video that's basically gonna explain the white woman syndrome more in depth and we're going to be discussing how this problem and where this problem started from.

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As national attention really continues and remains focused on the case of Gabby Petito, some of the conversation has now moved to an extremely difficult topic. Pioneering black broadcaster Gwen Ifill coined the term missing white woman syndrome. To describe the attention paid to certain missing persons cases. Fox 13's Max Roth takes an in-depth look. We talk a lot about this at Fox 13 honoring the intense interest in a story.

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While trying to bring out some of the bigger issues that the story evokes, like domestic violence in this case, or law enforcement or mental illness. And in this case, one of those issues is the coverage itself. This is nothing new to me, being a person of color growing up here in Utah. State Representative Angela Romero isn't upset about Gabby Petito getting attention. She's upset that women of color don't get the same headlines. And so these are difficult conversations that we have to have.

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And if we don't have these conversations, nothing's going to change. Romero wants to change the reality for Native American women. She's Latina and Native American herself, but she was surprised when she met with the group restoring ancestral winds. And they told me about the epidemic and the number of women who went missing that are indigenous to our state, meaning they're Native American. And it...

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horrified me. Gabby Petito died in Wyoming and that's where a state government report this year showed indigenous people were three percent of the population and 22 percent of murder victims so far in the century and only 18 percent of murdered indigenous women got any media attention. In many cases when we're talking about our indigenous communities when families knew that something had happened to their loved one or they didn't go missing.

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alone, they weren't believed. The pattern holds in other communities. This 2016 study in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology found clear evidence of what is commonly called missing white woman syndrome. FBI statistics show females went missing slightly less than males, but females got 73% of the headlines. Black people made up 35% of missing persons and got 13% of the coverage. White people got 68% of the coverage.

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And the FBI statistics did not track how many missing persons cases were Hispanic or Latino. A reminder for Romero of what she felt as a young girl in Utah. I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and it opened up my eyes to this feeling that I had growing up because I didn't have blonde hair and blue eyes. And I felt invisible at times. We've gone to Utah reservations to cover this issue of missing indigenous women. And as COVID rules loosen.

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We look forward to covering the initiative that was created by Representative Romero in legislation passed in 2019 to work with tribes to solve a problem that deserves attention in the newsroom. Max Roth, Fox 13 News. This video really dug into the missing white woman syndrome and the Gabby Petito case embodies a really clear cut example of the outrage that white women cases when white women go missing really garner.

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And they talked about how Indigenous women do not receive that same coverage. Adna, how do other groups, like for instance, Black people who go missing, how do they receive coverage and how does that correlate across different groups? Talking about the Gabby Petito case essay covered here, something that really resonated with me when I did research on this case was that at this exact time in August, 2021, Jelani Day went missing.

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He was also a black man who went missing. He was a person of color who went missing. He was a human who went missing at the same exact time that Gabby Petito did, right? But he got significantly less coverage than she did, right? She was blowing up all over the news and the way she was portrayed in the media was in a way that a lot of people were able to access and help her solve her case within 10 days of it going viral on social media. On the other hand,

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Jelani Day didn't get a thorough investigation. Even his family and his mother was complaining that they classified the case as a suicide case automatically without any further investigation onto how he went missing. And then you can just see that comparison within that same exact timeframe. And you can see how they don't put that much effort into solving POC cases. And later in this discussion, we're gonna deconstruct exactly why.

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that actually happens. But Jeremiah, what do you find interesting? What did you connect with in this video? Yeah, great point. I just find it horrifying how obvious and blatant the discrimination and the difference in media coverage is. And it takes me back a couple of years, three years now, to the coverage of George Floyd's murder and Ahmed Arbery's murder. Shortly after George Floyd was murdered, we weren't hearing about the good things in his life. We were hearing about...

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his aggravated robbery charge and his five-year prison sentence and how he was using a $20 counterfeit bill. We didn't hear about his dedication to his kids, how he was a really involved member of his community, how he was faithful, going to church every week and very involved with his church community. We didn't hear that he had moved from Texas to Minneapolis for a better life and that that life had been shattered by the Minneapolis law enforcement. And going to Ahmed Arbery's murder when he was jogging and killed by two white men.

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who were driving through the neighborhood. We didn't hear about the good things in his life either. We were hearing about all the bad, his shoplifting charge, the probation that he was put on for a weapons charge, not his star years as a football player for his high school, not that he regularly jogged in the area where he was murdered and that this was an obscene tragedy. So how did we get here? Why does this problem exist? Why does the disparity in media coverage exist? And why the disparity in reaction by law enforcement?

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So I think that we have to honestly go back all the way back to just talking about bias and stereotypes in general and where they even come from, right? Bias and stereotypes go back hundreds of years, right? They're built off of what people tell you, what environment you're surrounded by, the media like we're talking about right now. And all these things together create biases and stereotypes about different groups and about people of color.

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that allow them to be portrayed in this way, right? And so when we wanna deconstruct bias and stereotypes in missing persons of color cases, we can talk about three different things, right? And one of those things is that children of color are classified as runaways. And I'm gonna tell you exactly why this is an actual problem, right? The reason why children of color mean classified as runaways is a problem. It's because once they're classified as runaways, they don't receive an amber alert.

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That means basically they don't get a missing persons case. They don't get that case. And the people around them don't get notified when they get missing. And the craziest thing about this is that according to Black and Missing Foundation, nine out of 10 children of color are reported as runaways. Nine out of 10. That means only one out of all of these 10 are actually reported and people are actually alerted about. Right? And so that's really crazy to me.

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And that comes from this bias and stereotype that people of color, they have bad home life. They may not be going through the right thing. So, you know, they have a right to run away, right? But according to the Black and Missing founder, she said that, a good point that I definitely agree with, even if they did run away, they're still children. And we need to stop adultifying children of color, right? That's a whole nother topic, but we need to stop adultifying children of color, right? They're children. A 10-year-old cannot decide.

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that they choose to run away for life and they can't support their living that way, right? So even if they are classified as runaway, they should be classified as a missing persons case so that we can actually investigate and get this child back to their mother or their father or their parent or a better home life, right? If that's the case, right? And so one of these reasons why this problem exists is because of the bias and stereotypes that they've put on children of color to classify them as runaways because of the stereotypes that they currently have.

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shocking nine out of 10 missing children of color reported as runaways. That is just really, really shocking. And another cause of this problem is the criminalization of people of color. Missing minority adults are often classified as criminals and not thoroughly or even at all investigated due to an assumption, often an unfair and dehumanizing assumption that these people of color have been involved in criminal activity. For instance, take a few women.

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who were, well, let me take a step back. Women are also even further discriminated against and criminalized by being labeled as prostitutes or promiscuous and then treated unfairly by law enforcement as a result of that. Consider in Cleveland from 2007 to 2009, nearly a dozen women whose family members had noticed them go missing. The family members went to law enforcement and notified law enforcement that

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their family member, these women had all been going missing. And law enforcement told them that their loved ones were likely on drugs involved in prostitution or something else, and that once their drugs were off, they'd come home. They didn't, because these women were murdered by serial killer, Anthony Sowell. What if one or all of them could have been rescued? What if law enforcement had decided that these people's lives mattered enough to at least investigate? Maybe they could have been saved.

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And this is a pattern that emerges in crimes often and frequently. If you're engaged with much true crime content, you'll quickly find a trend of missing POC women cases being dismissed by police, given minimal attention, and either going unsolved or forcing the burden of solving the case onto civilian family members who may or may not have any reason or, or, uh, ability to investigate.

38:43

Yes, I definitely agree because for the next point, talking about missing persons of color and how their cases are dumbed down, we talk about desensitization as another reason. And I feel like that connects to both of our points as runaways and criminalization, right? The whole point is that law enforcement is trying to dumb down the stories of missing POC and almost like their life doesn't matter as much as this person's life does, you know, like categorizing them.

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based off their own bias and their own stereotypes about what they think about the case, classifying them as runaways or classifying them as criminals, right? That allows them to desensitize their actual case and make that case less than a dish. As you can see, this causes negative responses in the way that people see POC and just continues to add to that fire of the bias and stereotypes that we already receive in media. And it shows how what we see in media about these cases,

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can affect how these cases are solved, right? These are human cases, human lives that we're dealing with and how we portray it matters to how these cases are going to be solved. Absolutely, yeah. You know, we've got those three big significant causes, the desensitization, criminalization and then how we treat runaways who are children of color. So that's part of why we got here, but why is this still a problem? Why is this perpetuated? How can we understand why this keeps becoming a problem?

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I think it really boils down to how our media operates. Our media system sells stories that are the most sensational. So, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. That's a common phrase in journalism because they want the most clicks. They want to make ad revenue and they want people to flock to their attention, even if that means selling the most gruesome or the most shocking sensational content. So, because we live in a racist society that inherently prioritizes people based on skin color, then the darker someone looks,

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the more prejudice and obstacles they face and the lighter someone looks, you know, the inverse, the more valuable they are to society inherently, or because of our ingrained biases. Thus, our media coverage tends to perpetuate this by covering stories that'll get the most attention. And these stories involve the most respected members of society, the white people. So when a white woman goes missing, that's gonna get a lot of attention because they're in our racist society valued more. So our media system has the power to change this,

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it's reacting to socially embedded racism and covering the most sensational stories rather than proactively covering stories of underrepresented perspectives and communities that could possibly have the ability to solve these cases and shine light on these stories that could spur law enforcement to investigate more thoroughly. Yes, and as we transition to our action statements, we'll definitely be talking about that a lot and how.

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the newsroom can actually include more diversity inside their newsroom and be more proactive about that. But before that, we're gonna be talking a little bit about a case, a missing persons case that I really wanted to highlight, right? So personally, the background about me is that my parents are from Ethiopia, right? And recently in the Ethiopian community around the United States, there was a missing persons case for...

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a person by the name of Johannes Kidon. And so this missing person case was really, really prevalent in the Ethiopian community and everyone was doing everything they could to make sure that his case was heard. Right, and it was something that was very, very, something that was being very much talked about in our community, right? But once you stepped out of the Ethiopian community, you realized that nobody was talking about this missing person's case, right? And so to give you a little bit of context about this missing person's case,

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Johannes Kydahn was a 22 year old software engineer, and he recently graduated from the prestigious Cornell University and landed a promising career at the Netflix headquarters in San Francisco. Until one night he boarded an Uber and he disappeared. His belongings were found near the Golden Gate Bridge with his phone, his wallet, and his backpack sprawled over the area in which it looked like an attempted suicide. Right?

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And what I found the most interesting as coming back to the point I was talking about earlier is that once you stepped out of Ethiopia community, you didn't hear a single word about this case. Like nobody else knew about this case except those in the Ethiopian community. Right. And when I tried to do some research on this case, I only found one or two articles about dismissing persons. Right. And what I realized is that. How can we be so how like how can it be so easy to?

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Reject a person's life just like that. Like if personally, if I went missing, would feel so disheartening if other people were just like, and, you know what I mean? I feel like that's what we're kind of doing, like pushing these stories aside, like it happens all the time, so it's okay if it happens. It's never okay if a person goes missing. And I believe that we should all collectively work together on these missing person cases in our communities together to find these people, because these people deserve to be found.

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Their families deserve not to grieve because the law enforcement or their community are not able to support them, right? And the thing that I found most interesting about this case is that he actually told his friend some concerns about the concerns that he was having with an Uber earlier that week that actually dropped him off at the wrong location. And so he already had a concern about this, right? And we found that

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It was classified as a suicide on August 29th. And that confused a lot of people because none of the evidence led up to that. And everyone was questioning why the law enforcement didn't question the Uber route, didn't decide to talk to the Uber driver when he refused to be talked to, and just nothing made sense. And just they just eventually found his body and classified it as a suicide and end of case. No further investigation into how that happened. And it was just really...

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disheartening and saddening. That's kind of how I kind of wanted to talk about missing persons cases and people of color because they're not being heard. Their stories are being dumbed down and being classified as suicides and the story ends there. Why can't their cases be taken more seriously? Right, and so now I kind of want to talk a little bit about how we can make these steps more actionable, right? What things are we doing right now to prevent this from happening and how you can

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prevent it from happening in the future. So just talking about Minnesota, we actually passed a bill to create the nation's first office of missing and murdered African-American women. So basically in Minnesota, which is where Jeremiah and me reside, black women make up only 7% of the state's population, but they make up 40% of domestic violence victims. So this office will basically allow

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the state to do more investigation in black women's missing and murdered cases. These are the type of steps that we need to be taking to solve these issues and not dumb down people's missing persons cases because they may not matter to us or we don't have a connection or because of the stereotypes that we talked about earlier that we have to deconstruct, right? And so having actionable steps like this one is a good opportunity.

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our audience can take to solve these missing persons cases. Of course, yeah. Yeah, that example of the bill passing in Minnesota is a very exciting step that may be promising and showing that change is possible, potentially. We have to start small and then it can get larger. And some ways to start small can be pushing for more coverage of missing POC cases. So when their stories show up, when you hear about them, when you see them, share it on social media. Donate if you feel.

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like you understand the organization and feel comfortable donating, and even call up whichever law enforcement agency is responsible for investigating and tell them that this is a priority for you so that they can understand that this is something that people value and they can investigate accordingly. And also advocate for more diversity in newsrooms so that these stories can be covered and try to consume news from organizations that are run by racialized people and cover stories of POC.

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Also try and support and familiarize yourself with organizations such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the Black and Missing Foundation. In fact, the Black and Missing Foundation recently released a documentary on MACs. This is formally HBO MACs, which you can go and stream and learn more in depth about this topic through their organizational lens. So thank you all so much for joining us today and discussing this troubling and devastating topic.

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but it's so important to touch on and so important to try and find solutions to. So as you go about your day, as you go about the rest of your weeks, think about how you can support the cases of missing POC. Think about how you can amplify these stories and try and make an impact so that missing POC cases don't keep going to the wayside. And so that we can prioritize and give these cases the time and the energy and the investigation that they deserve.

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So thank you all for watching tonight's Arc of Change deep dive talk show. And we wish you the best on your anti-racism learning journey. Thank you.