Missing persons of color should be a pro-life issue for Catholics

The Gloria Purvis Podcast

Gwen Ifill famously coined the expression “missing white woman syndrome” to describe our national obsession with a small subset of missing persons–largely white and female– to the exclusion of many other victims, especially persons of color.

This week Gloria talks to Natalie Wilson, co-founder of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit dedicated to searching for missing people of color when police and the media fall short. Their work is also the subject of the award-winning 4-part HBO documentary series, Black and Missing, produced by Geeta Gandbhir and Soledad O’Brien.

For Catholics, this should be a pro-life issue, and one that we examine seriously. Forty percent of the about 600,000 people who went missing in 2019 were people of color — most of them Black. And Black people's cases take four times longer to resolve.

Gloria and Natalie also discuss how the Black Lives Matter movement encompasses more than police violence; it extends to the issue of police neglect to investigate cases of Black persons gone missing.

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Links:

The Black and Missing Foundation

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