Poor and Missing

In December 2010, 16-year-old Phylicia Barnes, a star student from Monroe, North Carolina came to Baltimore, Maryland to visit her half-sister during her winter break from school and was set to return home in January 2011. Sadly, Phylicia would never make it home. Phylicia came to Baltimore to reconnect with her older half-sister and father’s relatives. When Phylicia first went missing her story received little coverage from the media. Her mother fought to get more coverage for her missing child, eventually months after her disappearance Phylicia’s story garnered national attention and her face even appeared on large billboards around the city. Her family began to appear on national news networks and morning shows.

 In April 2011 Phylicia’s body would be found in the Susquehanna River. Phylicia’s story is so striking because it’s rare for a teenage Black girl who goes missing to get any form of national media coverage, what made Phylicia the exception was her girl next door identity. She was a beautiful, straight-A student from the south. From her pictures and her family and friends’ description of her she was a sweet girl who just wanted to reconnect with her half-sister. I always thought while watching the coverage, did this young girl only receive this level of coverage because she’s a “respectable” Black girl? I’ve thought of Phylicia quite often these past several weeks as the news covered the story of Gabby Petito and the conversation around missing white woman syndrome. Every couple of years the media becomes fixated on a missing white woman providing wall to wall coverage of her disappearance. Every time this happens the media is rightly criticized for their lack of coverage of missing Black, Indigenous and People of Color. The news media begins to scramble to tell their stories while faced with criticism but soon their stories are forgotten, and media coverage of their disappearances goes away.

Black people constitute 13% of the US population and 31% of missing persons; 54% of missing persons are white, though they make up 76% of the population (Purnell 2021).  In Wyoming, where Petito was found, just 18% of cases of missing Indigenous women over the past decade had any media coverage, according to a state report released in January (LINDSAY WHITEHURST 2021). Missing White Woman Syndrome isn’t the only problem with the coverage, but class is also an underlying theme that is often ignored. Would Gabby get the same coverage if she wasn’t young and attractive and came from an upper middle class family? Families like the Petito’s and Holloway’s whiteness and upper-class status not only allows for them to amplify their voices on tv media but also gives them leverage to press the police for more action. According to Newsweek nine bodies of missing persons have been found since the search for Gabby began (Newsweek 2021).

While Gabby’s case explored coverage centered around whiteness, more discussion needs to take place around class. If Phylicia Barnes was a poor single underaged mother, would she have received national coverage? During the criticism of the coverage, news agencies have been featuring cases of men and women of color all have at least been middle class. In the end media coverage and empathy for the missing only occurs when your someone society deems acceptable. The Petito case reminds us that you can’t go missing if you're poor, Black, Indigenous or Latino.