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According to the Black and Missing Foundation roughly 64,000 Black women are missing. However, little is known about these women due to the racialized and gendered narratives that collectively shroud their lives of and contribute to their disposability. Black women who go missing receive limited, negative, or no attention at all. Capturing attention requires their lives to be proven worthy, which is difficult when Black women narratives are linked to crime, mental illness and other issues to suggest they were some how responsible or deserving of their predicament. In this article we use a critical race feminist (CRF) framework and introduce a CRF methodology to center the stories of missing Black undergraduate women, disrupt the invisibility and disposability that ensures silence around their lives and highlight the need for more scholarly efforts that focus on Black women.
Keywords: Black woman, college, missing
Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, and Natalee Holloway are the names of women whose disappearance garnered overwhelming attention from the mainstream media and law enforcement officials. Their lives mattered to their families, friends and loved ones. However, their White bodies allowed them to matter in ways rarely if ever actualized for Black women. Stillman (2007) suggests examining this disparity can illuminate "who profits from turning attractive white female victims into national commodities; and by extension . . . counteract the myth of brown women's disposability" (p. 494). When Black women go missing, who really cares? According to statistics from the FBI's National Crime Information Center, 635,155 people are missing. People of color comprise 239,593 missing people. Roughly 64,000 missing persons are Black women and they seldom become the center of public attention (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, ViCap, n.d.).
BLACK WOMEN AND DISPOSABILITY
Laci Peterson was a young White woman who was married and nearing the end of her pregnancy. When she went missing, a media storm emerged and her story was among top news headlines (Bartenstein, 2004). Like Laci Peterson, La'Toyia Figueroa was also young and pregnant, but La'Toyia's name is one few people had heard. La'Toyia's race (Black), marital status (unmarried) and time of disappearance (within the same timeframe as Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway) ensured her disposability as someone unworthy of media attention.
La'Toyia's story received extremely limited attention until Richard...