Recently, the disappearance of young woman who was aspiring to be a YouTube influencer made national headlines. It was everywhere you looked, the TV, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok… ol’ Tik Tok.
Creators couldn’t get enough of the drama. Each new little twist was a reason to fire off another 30 second video trying to increase their account’s clout.
To the average person who just casually caught updates via the aforementioned mediums, the story sucked. Lovely girl, bright future, all snuffed out. But to people who live every single minute of their life running EVERYTHING through the prism of race, the story sucked for other reasons. The missing girl was white.
The usual suspects came out complaining to their extremely small, unfortunately ignorant bases. By usual suspects, I’m referring to Joy Reid and Don Lemon.
Reid and Lemon were upset because they felt the Gabby Petito case drew too much attention.
It wasn’t fair, you see, because as Joy Reid explained the story going viral was evidence of an even more serious issue - “missing white girl syndrome.”
It’s obvious why the story went viral… young basic white girls around Gabby’s age blew the story up by tweeting, retweeting, and Tik Tok’ing the story throughout social media.
They made Gabby’s disappearance a trend.
These things happen all the time on social media. Reid and Lemon seemed annoyed at the attention the story was getting and brought up instances of missing women of color who didn’t get the same publicity treatment.
But why didn’t the story of the numerous girls of color get publicity? Do these journos and 24 hour news channels not realize that nobody is keeping them from covering other cases?
Those women would've benefitted greatly if a member of the squad would’ve demanded their cases get attention. Those women didn’t get even get mentioned by Reid until the story of a white girl gone missing trended.
Reid and Lemon don’t give two shits about Gabby Petito and they don’t give two shits about those missing girls of color. The next time Don Lemon or Joy Reid talks about this statistic, will be the first time they come within the same universe of talking about this statistic:
No, Don and Joy only care about being the successful misery merchants and grief pimps that they are - and right on cue the term "missing white woman syndrome" is now among the top results when you search for Gabby Petito's name on Twitter.
They’re influence and platforms continue to shrink and hopefully soon they’ll be relegated to hosting their own cute little podcasts where other racists can join them and share in their misery.