Have You Seen This (Black) Child?

Campaign Makes Issue of Media Bias in Abduction Cases

Posted by Ken Wheaton on 03.05.08 @ 11:49 AM

It's almost a punch line these days. Some attractive teenage white girl goes missing or dead and we're guaranteed to hear about it for weeks or months or in perpetuity. It makes for a great SNL skit.

What would make for a better one -- but in a funny-sad rather than a funny-ha-ha way -- is Nancy Grace or Greta van Susteren worrying their fake blonde locks over the disappearance of a non-white child.

Of course, the reality is that never happens. And the reality is, while the talking TV heads' story selection is even less diverse than the halls of a mainstream ad agency, there are people out there working to find missing Black and Hispanic kids.

Hadji Williams, author of Knock the Hustle, sent over some posters he created for a group trying to bring attention to missing minority children. They come in two flavors, so to speak.

One set features a profile of a "composite" white kid "last seen on" CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. (I think it might hurt the effort that the photo is of a real missing person).

The other set features missing minority kids -- probably last seen at the spot they were abducted and maybe in a local newspaper or two. The cases are so similar to the mainstream cases that get all the media attention, one starts to wonder ... Nah, let's not finish that thought.

The "We Want Our Kids Back, Too" effort, said Williams, sprung out of the passion of sites such as BlackandMissing.blogspot.com and similar sites.

The effort lives online only for the moment, on the various blogs and through direct e-mail outreach. If funding and publicity start coming in, there's a possibility they'll branch out into print and TV. Williams said they'll break Webisodes later in the year.

And, he adds, "No word from Greta Van Susteren or Nancy Grace. They're both busy trying to crack the Drew Peterson case."