WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.899 Okay, so picture this. It's, you know, a Tuesday 00:00:01.899 --> 00:00:04.820 night. Maybe it's 7 o 'clock. You've just finished 00:00:04.820 --> 00:00:07.139 dinner. Dishes are done. You're finally sitting 00:00:07.139 --> 00:00:09.839 down to unwind. Yep, I know that feeling. And 00:00:09.839 --> 00:00:12.759 you flip on the TV or... Let's be real. You're 00:00:12.759 --> 00:00:14.359 probably just scrolling on your phone, Twitter, 00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:17.039 TikTok, whatever. And then you see it, that red 00:00:17.039 --> 00:00:20.359 banner, breaking news. It always gets you. That 00:00:20.359 --> 00:00:23.100 little jolt, the music changes, the whole tone 00:00:23.100 --> 00:00:26.480 shifts. Exactly. It demands your attention. And 00:00:26.480 --> 00:00:28.160 there's a face on the screen. It's usually a 00:00:28.160 --> 00:00:30.179 photo, maybe pulled from Instagram, probably 00:00:30.179 --> 00:00:33.000 a selfie or graduation picture. And the headline 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:37.399 is huge, missing. And just like that, everything 00:00:37.399 --> 00:00:40.030 kind of stops. We've all seen it. Yeah. And you 00:00:40.030 --> 00:00:42.189 immediately feel that pit in your stomach. You 00:00:42.189 --> 00:00:44.409 see the search parties. You hear about the helicopters. 00:00:44.530 --> 00:00:46.609 You see the family pleading at a press conference. 00:00:46.750 --> 00:00:49.649 It's a it's a really compelling and obviously 00:00:49.649 --> 00:00:52.070 tragic story. But just pause there for a second. 00:00:52.109 --> 00:00:55.149 I want you listening right now to really visualize 00:00:55.149 --> 00:00:57.409 that face. The face you usually see when a case 00:00:57.409 --> 00:01:00.570 gets that wall to wall, 247 cable news treatment. 00:01:00.770 --> 00:01:02.570 If we're being totally honest with ourselves, 00:01:02.869 --> 00:01:05.790 who are we usually looking at? Well, if we're 00:01:05.790 --> 00:01:09.430 going by the last, say. Two decades of media 00:01:09.430 --> 00:01:13.450 coverage. Statistically, you are probably picturing 00:01:13.450 --> 00:01:15.849 a young woman. Young woman. A young white woman, 00:01:15.930 --> 00:01:18.250 probably attractive, probably from a middle class 00:01:18.250 --> 00:01:21.269 or upper middle class background. The girl next 00:01:21.269 --> 00:01:23.810 door, if you will. And that right there is a 00:01:23.810 --> 00:01:25.290 really uncomfortable thing we're going to get 00:01:25.290 --> 00:01:27.349 into today. It's a pattern that I think a lot 00:01:27.349 --> 00:01:29.549 of us feel. You know, it's like this glitch we've 00:01:29.549 --> 00:01:31.849 all noticed, but maybe haven't put a name to. 00:01:32.049 --> 00:01:34.799 But it's not just a feeling. It's a documented, 00:01:34.980 --> 00:01:38.319 studied phenomenon. It has a name, it has a history, 00:01:38.420 --> 00:01:40.939 and it has some really, really devastating consequences. 00:01:41.319 --> 00:01:44.000 We are talking about missing white woman syndrome. 00:01:44.340 --> 00:01:47.120 And it's a term that I know makes people bristle. 00:01:47.159 --> 00:01:49.959 It sounds accusatory. It does. But this deep 00:01:49.959 --> 00:01:53.359 dive isn't about blaming viewers or even diminishing 00:01:53.359 --> 00:01:56.079 the absolute tragedy of any single person who 00:01:56.079 --> 00:01:59.260 goes missing. It's about looking at a huge systemic 00:01:59.260 --> 00:02:02.299 bias in our media. It's a phrase that social 00:02:02.299 --> 00:02:05.439 scientists use to describe this massive disproportionate 00:02:05.439 --> 00:02:08.560 coverage given to missing young white affluent 00:02:08.560 --> 00:02:11.099 women. Compared to, well, everyone else. Exactly. 00:02:11.099 --> 00:02:13.560 Compared to men, compared to people of color, 00:02:13.659 --> 00:02:16.020 and very specifically compared to women of color. 00:02:16.340 --> 00:02:18.719 It's about who gets that prime time slot and 00:02:18.719 --> 00:02:21.460 who gets, you know, maybe a brief mention on 00:02:21.460 --> 00:02:24.300 the local news at 11 if they're lucky. And today 00:02:24.300 --> 00:02:26.939 we're not just going on feelings. We have a whole 00:02:26.939 --> 00:02:29.219 stack of research here. We have studies from 00:02:29.219 --> 00:02:32.460 Northwestern. We have FBI data. We have reports 00:02:32.460 --> 00:02:36.280 from the UK, Canada. We're going to peel back 00:02:36.280 --> 00:02:38.080 all layers. We're going to look at what makes 00:02:38.080 --> 00:02:40.919 the perfect victim for a news producer. We're 00:02:40.919 --> 00:02:42.599 going to talk about something called racial grammar. 00:02:42.780 --> 00:02:44.939 That one really jumped out at me. Racial grammar. 00:02:45.240 --> 00:02:47.379 Yeah. And we'll look at cases that happened at 00:02:47.379 --> 00:02:50.340 the exact same time in the exact same place that 00:02:50.340 --> 00:02:53.400 were almost identical on paper. But the media 00:02:53.400 --> 00:02:55.219 treated them like they were from different planets. 00:02:55.379 --> 00:02:57.479 And maybe the most important part, we're going 00:02:57.479 --> 00:02:59.539 to see how all this coverage, all this attention 00:02:59.539 --> 00:03:02.500 actually ends up writing our laws. Because what 00:03:02.500 --> 00:03:05.060 happens on TV, it doesn't just stay there. Not 00:03:05.060 --> 00:03:08.099 at all. It changes policy. It changes policing. 00:03:08.360 --> 00:03:11.599 It changes who our society decides is worth protecting. 00:03:11.919 --> 00:03:14.360 So welcome to the deep dive. Let's start at the 00:03:14.360 --> 00:03:17.400 beginning. Because this phrase, missing white 00:03:17.400 --> 00:03:19.879 woman syndrome, it sounds very modern, right? 00:03:19.960 --> 00:03:21.800 Like something that started on a blog or as a 00:03:21.800 --> 00:03:23.919 hashtag. You'd think so, but no. It actually 00:03:23.919 --> 00:03:25.840 comes from the highest echelons of journalism. 00:03:25.879 --> 00:03:28.539 From someone who was in the room where it happened, 00:03:28.680 --> 00:03:31.460 so to speak. Exactly. We have to go back to 2004. 00:03:31.759 --> 00:03:34.180 The setting is the unity. Journalists of color 00:03:34.180 --> 00:03:37.800 conference. And on a panel is the absolute legend, 00:03:38.020 --> 00:03:40.860 Gwen Enkephil. I mean. A titan of the industry. 00:03:41.080 --> 00:03:43.939 PBS, NBC. She knew how the sausage was made. 00:03:44.080 --> 00:03:46.039 She knew everything. She saw the budgets. She 00:03:46.039 --> 00:03:47.840 saw the rundowns. She knew which stories got 00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:49.699 killed and which ones got a primetime special. 00:03:50.099 --> 00:03:52.039 And she just cut right through all the jargon 00:03:52.039 --> 00:03:54.020 and said it. She said, I call it the missing 00:03:54.020 --> 00:03:56.900 white woman search syndrome. Wow. Just laid it 00:03:56.900 --> 00:03:59.020 out there. Laid it out there. And her next sentence 00:03:59.020 --> 00:04:01.539 is the key. She said, if there is a missing white 00:04:01.539 --> 00:04:04.379 woman, we're going to cover that every day. Every 00:04:04.379 --> 00:04:06.639 day. That's the part. It's not just that it gets 00:04:06.639 --> 00:04:10.039 covered once. It's the. The serialization of 00:04:10.039 --> 00:04:12.620 it. The commitment. That's the word. The commitment 00:04:12.620 --> 00:04:15.039 to the narrative. She was pointing out that a 00:04:15.039 --> 00:04:16.959 white woman's tragedy becomes a national drama 00:04:16.959 --> 00:04:20.240 series with daily updates. But a tragedy in a 00:04:20.240 --> 00:04:23.100 black or brown community, it's treated as a local 00:04:23.100 --> 00:04:26.240 crime blotter item. A statistic. It's the difference 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:28.620 between being the lead story and being on the 00:04:28.620 --> 00:04:30.600 ticker at the bottom of the screen. Precisely. 00:04:30.860 --> 00:04:34.120 Gwen Ifill gave a name to a feeling that so many 00:04:34.120 --> 00:04:36.779 people had for decades, that their loved ones 00:04:36.779 --> 00:04:38.620 just didn't matter as much to the people running 00:04:38.620 --> 00:04:40.860 the cameras. Okay, so let's get into the anatomy 00:04:40.860 --> 00:04:43.920 of this. If we were, and I know this sounds cynical, 00:04:44.040 --> 00:04:45.680 but if we were a cable news producer casting 00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:48.959 for our next big missing person story, what's 00:04:48.959 --> 00:04:51.600 the profile? What are the specs for the perfect 00:04:51.600 --> 00:04:53.839 victim? Well, the archetype is often called the 00:04:53.839 --> 00:04:57.220 damsel in distress. And the criteria are surprisingly 00:04:57.220 --> 00:05:01.220 specific. First, the obvious demographics. Young, 00:05:01.379 --> 00:05:03.540 white, and conventionally attractive. Right. 00:05:03.560 --> 00:05:05.420 Not just attractive, but attractive in a very 00:05:05.420 --> 00:05:08.519 specific, non -threatening, mainstream way. Yes. 00:05:08.920 --> 00:05:11.560 But it's more than that. It's about class. And 00:05:11.560 --> 00:05:15.139 this is crucial. Perceived innocence. The victim 00:05:15.139 --> 00:05:17.339 has to be seen as worthy of a national rescue 00:05:17.339 --> 00:05:20.779 effort. Worthy? What does that mean in this context? 00:05:21.360 --> 00:05:23.060 It generally means she's from an upper middle 00:05:23.060 --> 00:05:25.800 class background. She's a student or has a respectable 00:05:25.800 --> 00:05:28.680 job. She comes from a stable two -parent family. 00:05:29.129 --> 00:05:31.829 There's no criminal record, no hint of a messy 00:05:31.829 --> 00:05:34.529 life. The girl with the bright future, the one 00:05:34.529 --> 00:05:38.029 who lit up every room she walked into. You hear 00:05:38.029 --> 00:05:40.750 those phrases over and over. Every single time. 00:05:40.829 --> 00:05:42.990 It's part of the script. But let's look at what 00:05:42.990 --> 00:05:44.870 happens when some of those boxes aren't checked, 00:05:44.970 --> 00:05:46.769 because I think some people might hear this and 00:05:46.769 --> 00:05:49.850 think it's only about race. But you found a case 00:05:49.850 --> 00:05:52.930 that shows how class and this idea of innocence 00:05:52.930 --> 00:05:55.970 are just as important. The case of Tiffany Witten. 00:05:56.509 --> 00:05:58.930 This is such a heartbreaking and telling example. 00:05:59.129 --> 00:06:01.589 It was detailed in the 2016 Esquire article. 00:06:02.069 --> 00:06:04.230 Tiffany Wynn was a 26 -year -old white woman 00:06:04.230 --> 00:06:06.569 from Georgia who went missing. So on the surface, 00:06:06.629 --> 00:06:08.350 you see her picture, you think, OK, young white 00:06:08.350 --> 00:06:10.930 woman, this fits. Right. So according to the 00:06:10.930 --> 00:06:12.870 theory, she should have been on every news channel. 00:06:13.050 --> 00:06:15.310 She should have been. But there was almost total 00:06:15.310 --> 00:06:19.410 media silence. And the reason why tells you everything 00:06:19.410 --> 00:06:21.529 you need to know. So what was different about 00:06:21.529 --> 00:06:24.740 her? Tiffany's life wasn't neat. It wasn't the 00:06:24.740 --> 00:06:28.360 perfect victim narrative. She was a mother, but 00:06:28.360 --> 00:06:29.879 she was also struggling with drug addiction. 00:06:30.120 --> 00:06:32.319 She was unemployed at the time she disappeared. 00:06:32.639 --> 00:06:36.040 She was on parole for theft. Ah, so she wasn't 00:06:36.040 --> 00:06:38.399 the innocent damsel. In the eyes of a news producer, 00:06:38.779 --> 00:06:42.379 she was complicated. Her story wasn't a simple 00:06:42.379 --> 00:06:46.060 good versus evil fairy tale. In 24 -hour news... 00:06:46.350 --> 00:06:48.870 They hate complicated. It muddies the narrative. 00:06:49.189 --> 00:06:51.750 It does. And her mother's experience trying to 00:06:51.750 --> 00:06:54.790 get coverage was just brutal. She said she reached 00:06:54.790 --> 00:06:57.529 out to producers for major crime shows. She even 00:06:57.529 --> 00:06:59.269 mentioned The Nancy Grace Show, which at the 00:06:59.269 --> 00:07:01.449 time was the absolute epicenter of this kind 00:07:01.449 --> 00:07:02.949 of coverage. Oh, yeah. If you were a missing 00:07:02.949 --> 00:07:05.170 white woman, that was your prime time slot. And 00:07:05.170 --> 00:07:07.129 according to Tiffany's mother, the producers 00:07:07.129 --> 00:07:09.089 basically told her they weren't interested. They 00:07:09.089 --> 00:07:11.290 just said that to the mother of a missing person. 00:07:11.930 --> 00:07:14.449 Sorry, not interested. That was the allegation, 00:07:14.490 --> 00:07:18.110 yes. Because her story didn't fit the mold. The 00:07:18.110 --> 00:07:20.569 journalist who wrote the piece, Tom Junod, he 00:07:20.569 --> 00:07:23.009 called the media's selection process ruthlessly 00:07:23.009 --> 00:07:26.290 selective. He argued that as soon as you introduce 00:07:26.290 --> 00:07:29.610 things like addiction or a criminal record, the 00:07:29.610 --> 00:07:32.550 audience's sympathy starts to curdle into judgment. 00:07:32.810 --> 00:07:35.089 You stop seeing the victim as someone like your 00:07:35.089 --> 00:07:36.970 own daughter and you start seeing them as someone 00:07:36.970 --> 00:07:40.149 who made bad choices. Exactly. The narrative 00:07:40.149 --> 00:07:43.910 shifts from let's find her to. What did she do 00:07:43.910 --> 00:07:45.949 to get into this situation? It's like you're 00:07:45.949 --> 00:07:48.470 casting a character in a movie. And if the hero 00:07:48.470 --> 00:07:50.569 has too many flaws, you think the audience won't 00:07:50.569 --> 00:07:52.509 root for them. So you just you don't make the 00:07:52.509 --> 00:07:55.329 movie. That is a perfect, if chilling way to 00:07:55.329 --> 00:07:57.610 put it. And this whole selection process, it 00:07:57.610 --> 00:08:00.269 relies on this underlying structure. A sociologist 00:08:00.269 --> 00:08:02.829 named Eduardo Bonilla Silva has a term for it 00:08:02.829 --> 00:08:05.310 that you mentioned earlier. Racial grammar. It's 00:08:05.310 --> 00:08:07.069 such a powerful phrase. It really stuck with 00:08:07.069 --> 00:08:08.610 me. Can you break down what he means by that? 00:08:08.750 --> 00:08:11.680 Sure. So think about grammar in English. It's 00:08:11.680 --> 00:08:13.959 the set of invisible rules that we all follow 00:08:13.959 --> 00:08:16.000 to make sense. We don't consciously think, okay, 00:08:16.060 --> 00:08:20.000 subject, verb, object. We just talk. And if someone 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:22.680 uses bad grammar, it just sounds wrong to our 00:08:22.680 --> 00:08:25.160 ears. That's intuitive. Right. Bonilla -Silva 00:08:25.160 --> 00:08:27.560 argues that our society has a racial grammar, 00:08:27.699 --> 00:08:30.279 an invisible set of rules that we all learn, 00:08:30.420 --> 00:08:33.179 which treats whiteness as the default, the normal, 00:08:33.299 --> 00:08:35.779 the universal standard. So a white person's story 00:08:35.779 --> 00:08:38.659 is just a human story, but a black person's story 00:08:38.659 --> 00:08:41.120 is specifically a black story. You've got it. 00:08:41.200 --> 00:08:44.039 So when a white woman is in danger, the racial 00:08:44.039 --> 00:08:46.659 grammar frames it as a universal tragedy that 00:08:46.659 --> 00:08:49.080 should concern everyone. The implied message 00:08:49.080 --> 00:08:51.320 is this could be your daughter, your sister, 00:08:51.419 --> 00:08:53.840 no matter who you are. We're all expected to 00:08:53.840 --> 00:08:56.019 see ourselves in her. But that empathy is not 00:08:56.019 --> 00:08:58.860 expected to flow the other way. Never. The grammar 00:08:58.860 --> 00:09:00.679 tells us that violence against a black woman 00:09:00.679 --> 00:09:03.059 is a community -specific problem. It's a them 00:09:03.059 --> 00:09:06.259 problem, not an us problem. It's seen as, sadly, 00:09:06.379 --> 00:09:08.460 more normal, more expected. It's a background 00:09:08.460 --> 00:09:11.159 noise versus a siren. That's a great way to put 00:09:11.159 --> 00:09:15.519 it. Charlton McIlwain, a professor at NYU. He 00:09:15.519 --> 00:09:17.720 says that white women hold this privileged position 00:09:17.720 --> 00:09:20.519 in our culture as the ultimate victims of violent 00:09:20.519 --> 00:09:22.820 crime. They are the figures who are supposed 00:09:22.820 --> 00:09:26.000 to be protected above all others. So when that 00:09:26.000 --> 00:09:29.000 system fails, it's a profound shock to the social 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:31.639 order. But when a black woman is harmed, the 00:09:31.639 --> 00:09:33.840 culture sort of tragically shrugs and says, well, 00:09:33.919 --> 00:09:36.799 what do you expect in those neighborhoods? The 00:09:36.799 --> 00:09:40.320 racial grammar has already coded her as less 00:09:40.320 --> 00:09:43.700 valuable, less innocent. less worthy of a national 00:09:43.700 --> 00:09:46.039 panic. It is literally the difference between 00:09:46.039 --> 00:09:48.419 a tragedy and a statistic. That's it in a nutshell. 00:09:48.740 --> 00:09:50.799 OK, so I want to play devil's advocate for a 00:09:50.799 --> 00:09:52.720 minute for the skeptic listening who's thinking, 00:09:52.899 --> 00:09:55.000 OK, this all sounds plausible. I see the logic. 00:09:55.220 --> 00:09:58.059 But is it real or is this just confirmation bias? 00:09:58.200 --> 00:10:01.179 Do we just remember the big high profile cases 00:10:01.179 --> 00:10:03.259 like Leslie Peterson and forget all the others? 00:10:03.299 --> 00:10:06.120 We need the data. And that's the right question 00:10:06.120 --> 00:10:08.220 to ask. For a long time, this was just an observation, 00:10:08.399 --> 00:10:11.639 an anecdote. But then in 2016, a sociologist 00:10:11.639 --> 00:10:13.679 at Northwestern University named Zach Summers 00:10:13.679 --> 00:10:16.799 decided to actually quantify it. OK, so how do 00:10:16.799 --> 00:10:19.440 you even do that? How do you measure media intensity? 00:10:19.679 --> 00:10:22.279 That seems so subjective. It's a really smart 00:10:22.279 --> 00:10:24.539 study design. What Summers did was he took two 00:10:24.539 --> 00:10:27.779 data sets. On one hand, he had the FBI's official 00:10:27.779 --> 00:10:31.019 missing persons database. That's the ground truth. 00:10:31.299 --> 00:10:34.220 That's who is actually. factually missing in 00:10:34.220 --> 00:10:36.500 the United States. The reality. The reality. 00:10:36.759 --> 00:10:39.519 On the other hand, he compiled all the news coverage 00:10:39.519 --> 00:10:41.879 of missing persons from four major media outlets, 00:10:42.139 --> 00:10:46.519 CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and a major regional paper, 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:49.019 the Atlanta Journal -Constitution. So he's comparing 00:10:49.019 --> 00:10:51.279 what's on the screen to what's in the FBI's files. 00:10:51.639 --> 00:10:54.159 Exactly. He was looking for the gaps, the discrepancies, 00:10:54.360 --> 00:10:56.960 and he found two huge things. Okay. What was 00:10:56.960 --> 00:10:58.980 the first? The first was just about baseline 00:10:58.980 --> 00:11:02.240 visibility. He found that black people of all 00:11:02.240 --> 00:11:05.059 ages and genders were disproportionately less 00:11:05.059 --> 00:11:07.440 likely to be mentioned in the news at all compared 00:11:07.440 --> 00:11:10.159 to how often they go missing. So there's a blackout 00:11:10.159 --> 00:11:11.899 right from the start. So if you're a black person 00:11:11.899 --> 00:11:13.600 who's gone missing, your odds of even getting 00:11:13.600 --> 00:11:16.080 a single mention are already lower. Much lower. 00:11:16.299 --> 00:11:18.279 But the second finding is the one that really 00:11:18.279 --> 00:11:21.659 gets to the syndrome part. He measured the intensity 00:11:21.659 --> 00:11:23.740 of the coverage. And what does that mean? Like 00:11:23.740 --> 00:11:26.639 minutes of airtime. It means number of articles 00:11:26.639 --> 00:11:28.940 per case, the duration of the coverage over days 00:11:28.940 --> 00:11:31.679 or weeks, whether the story got updates. And 00:11:31.679 --> 00:11:33.279 he found that when a missing white woman does 00:11:33.279 --> 00:11:35.919 get covered, the nature of that coverage is fundamentally 00:11:35.919 --> 00:11:37.879 different. It's more intense. It's stickier. 00:11:38.019 --> 00:11:41.200 So a missing black teenager might get a single 00:11:41.200 --> 00:11:44.600 30 -second report. Police are looking for so 00:11:44.600 --> 00:11:46.980 -and -so. She was last seen here. Call this number. 00:11:47.340 --> 00:11:50.440 End of story. Right. But a missing white woman 00:11:50.440 --> 00:11:53.440 gets the whole package. Day five of the search. 00:11:54.059 --> 00:11:57.039 A look inside her diary. An exclusive interview 00:11:57.039 --> 00:12:00.620 with her best friend. Tonight, a candlelight 00:12:00.620 --> 00:12:03.559 vigil. It becomes a recurring series. A drama 00:12:03.559 --> 00:12:05.820 that unfolds for the audience night after night. 00:12:06.019 --> 00:12:09.159 And that repetition is what lodges a victim in 00:12:09.159 --> 00:12:11.360 the public consciousness. You see a face once 00:12:11.360 --> 00:12:14.220 on the news. You forget it an hour later. You 00:12:14.220 --> 00:12:16.299 see that same face every night for three weeks. 00:12:16.399 --> 00:12:18.539 You start to feel like you know her. You become 00:12:18.539 --> 00:12:20.559 personally invested in the outcome. And you feel 00:12:20.559 --> 00:12:23.019 like you're part of the search. Exactly. You 00:12:23.019 --> 00:12:25.000 feel a stake in it. Now, there was another study 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:26.779 you sent over that I thought was fascinating 00:12:26.779 --> 00:12:28.899 because it adds a really important layer of nuance 00:12:28.899 --> 00:12:32.379 here. The 2019 study by Slakoff and Fridella. 00:12:33.159 --> 00:12:35.899 Because we tend to frame this as a simple black 00:12:35.899 --> 00:12:38.220 versus white issue. Right. And they found it's 00:12:38.220 --> 00:12:40.360 a little more complex than that. They looked 00:12:40.360 --> 00:12:42.259 at the news coverage and found something really 00:12:42.259 --> 00:12:45.500 unexpected. It wasn't just a case of white women 00:12:45.500 --> 00:12:48.039 get all the coverage and women of color get none. 00:12:48.279 --> 00:12:50.919 OK, so what did they find? They found that in 00:12:50.919 --> 00:12:54.490 their sample. Non -black women of color, so specifically 00:12:54.490 --> 00:12:57.750 Asian and Latina women, were actually represented 00:12:57.750 --> 00:13:00.649 at rates pretty similar to white women, sometimes 00:13:00.649 --> 00:13:03.070 even slightly overrepresented compared to their 00:13:03.070 --> 00:13:05.909 missing person statistics. Really? So the invisibility 00:13:05.909 --> 00:13:08.529 isn't applied equally across all non -white groups? 00:13:08.789 --> 00:13:11.070 Not in the same way, which led them to their 00:13:11.070 --> 00:13:13.509 big conclusion. They argued that missing white 00:13:13.509 --> 00:13:16.250 woman syndrome is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer. 00:13:16.409 --> 00:13:18.649 A misnomer. So what did they propose instead? 00:13:19.159 --> 00:13:21.419 They suggested that a more accurate name for 00:13:21.419 --> 00:13:25.059 the phenomenon would be the specific underrepresentation 00:13:25.059 --> 00:13:28.480 of black women's syndrome. Wow. That really, 00:13:28.500 --> 00:13:31.139 that puts a much finer point on it. It's not 00:13:31.139 --> 00:13:33.600 just a preference for whiteness. It's a specific 00:13:33.600 --> 00:13:36.259 and measurable anti -blackness. The data really 00:13:36.259 --> 00:13:39.259 backs that up. In their study sample, black women 00:13:39.259 --> 00:13:41.860 and girls accounted for over a third more than 00:13:41.860 --> 00:13:45.039 33 % of all the actual missing persons cases. 00:13:45.279 --> 00:13:47.240 A third of all missing women and girls are black. 00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:50.399 Yes. But they only accounted for about 20 % of 00:13:50.399 --> 00:13:53.190 the news stories. Yeah. That is a massive, massive 00:13:53.190 --> 00:13:55.750 gap between reality and representation. You're 00:13:55.750 --> 00:13:58.049 basically erasing one out of every three black 00:13:58.049 --> 00:14:00.490 victims from the public narrative. Let's ground 00:14:00.490 --> 00:14:02.470 this in the big FBI numbers for a second, just 00:14:02.470 --> 00:14:03.970 so people can really understand the scale of 00:14:03.970 --> 00:14:05.409 what we're talking about. This isn't a few dozen 00:14:05.409 --> 00:14:08.700 cases a year. No, not even close. The FBI's National 00:14:08.700 --> 00:14:12.500 Crime Information Center, the NCIC, in 2020 alone 00:14:12.500 --> 00:14:16.600 had over 540 ,000 active missing person files 00:14:16.600 --> 00:14:18.840 entered into its system. Half a million people. 00:14:18.980 --> 00:14:21.639 In one year, that's the entire population of 00:14:21.639 --> 00:14:23.679 a city like Sacramento or Atlanta, just gone. 00:14:23.860 --> 00:14:26.399 It's staggering. And when you break down those 00:14:26.399 --> 00:14:30.019 540 ,000 files by race, the disparity is just 00:14:30.019 --> 00:14:34.179 impossible to ignore. In that 2020 data, Black 00:14:34.179 --> 00:14:37.320 people made up roughly 35 % of all missing person 00:14:37.320 --> 00:14:40.639 files. 35%. Let's repeat that. And to put that 00:14:40.639 --> 00:14:43.559 in context, black people make up about 13 % of 00:14:43.559 --> 00:14:46.299 the U .S. population. Correct. So they are overrepresented 00:14:46.299 --> 00:14:49.320 in the missing population by almost a factor 00:14:49.320 --> 00:14:52.039 of three. While being, as we just established, 00:14:52.220 --> 00:14:54.679 massively underrepresented in the news coverage. 00:14:54.779 --> 00:14:56.620 The very definition of a crisis that is being 00:14:56.620 --> 00:14:59.299 ignored. Now, compare that to white people, including 00:14:59.299 --> 00:15:01.899 Hispanics in this particular FBI grouping. They 00:15:01.899 --> 00:15:04.259 made up about 61 percent of the missing files. 00:15:04.360 --> 00:15:07.200 OK, 61 percent. But they represent close to 80 00:15:07.200 --> 00:15:09.860 percent of the U .S. population. So white people 00:15:09.860 --> 00:15:11.919 are actually underrepresented in the missing 00:15:11.919 --> 00:15:14.820 persons data relative to their share of the population. 00:15:15.139 --> 00:15:16.899 So this is what you were saying earlier. It's 00:15:16.899 --> 00:15:20.259 a complete inversion of reality. If your only 00:15:20.259 --> 00:15:22.879 source of information was the evening news, you 00:15:22.879 --> 00:15:24.779 would be convinced that the single greatest danger 00:15:24.779 --> 00:15:27.100 in America is being a young white woman. You'd 00:15:27.100 --> 00:15:28.860 be terrified for them. You'd think they were 00:15:28.860 --> 00:15:31.720 being abducted constantly. When in reality, the 00:15:31.720 --> 00:15:34.179 data clearly shows that black Americans, and 00:15:34.179 --> 00:15:36.419 particularly black women, are going missing at 00:15:36.419 --> 00:15:39.600 a far, far higher rate. And we just don't talk 00:15:39.600 --> 00:15:42.259 about it. It's a curated reality designed to 00:15:42.259 --> 00:15:45.440 focus our fear and our sympathy on one specific 00:15:45.440 --> 00:15:48.059 group while rendering another group suffering 00:15:48.059 --> 00:15:50.129 invisible. So that brings us to the big question. 00:15:50.169 --> 00:15:52.809 Why? Why does the media do this? We talked about 00:15:52.809 --> 00:15:54.870 the damsel archetype, but let's dig into the 00:15:54.870 --> 00:15:57.350 psychology of how these stories are told. Because 00:15:57.350 --> 00:15:59.269 it can't just be that news producers are sitting 00:15:59.269 --> 00:16:01.830 in a room thinking, let's be racist today. They're 00:16:01.830 --> 00:16:03.450 chasing an audience. They're chasing ratings. 00:16:03.789 --> 00:16:06.450 So what is it about these specific narratives 00:16:06.450 --> 00:16:09.230 that hooks us? A lot of it comes down to a really 00:16:09.230 --> 00:16:13.009 simple but powerful binary. Blame versus innocence. 00:16:13.960 --> 00:16:16.039 Sociologists argue that the media frames victims 00:16:16.039 --> 00:16:18.980 differently by race in order to tap into pre 00:16:18.980 --> 00:16:21.840 -existing societal biases and stereotypes. Okay, 00:16:21.899 --> 00:16:24.259 so lay it out for us. What does the typical white 00:16:24.259 --> 00:16:26.600 narrative sound like compared to the black narrative? 00:16:26.899 --> 00:16:29.039 When a white woman goes missing, the story is 00:16:29.039 --> 00:16:31.799 always framed as a story of loss. The coverage 00:16:31.799 --> 00:16:34.120 focuses on her positive roles in the community. 00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:36.600 The things we mentioned. She's a mother. She's 00:16:36.600 --> 00:16:39.100 a beloved teacher. A straight -A student. Exactly. 00:16:39.100 --> 00:16:42.769 She volunteered at the animal shelter. The subtext, 00:16:42.929 --> 00:16:47.009 the unspoken message is, her life has value to 00:16:47.009 --> 00:16:50.090 all of us. Her absence leaves a hole in the fabric 00:16:50.090 --> 00:16:53.230 of society, and we must find her to repair it. 00:16:53.350 --> 00:16:55.710 And the black narrative, assuming there even 00:16:55.710 --> 00:16:58.789 is one. Assuming there is one. If the story gets 00:16:58.789 --> 00:17:01.470 any airtime at all, it often pivots very quickly 00:17:01.470 --> 00:17:04.109 to focus on pathology or risk. What do you mean 00:17:04.109 --> 00:17:06.609 by that? The reporting will subtly or not so 00:17:06.609 --> 00:17:10.210 subtly introduce details that imply she was in 00:17:10.210 --> 00:17:13.180 some way responsible for her own fate. They'll 00:17:13.180 --> 00:17:15.420 mention she had a troubled past or she was last 00:17:15.420 --> 00:17:18.200 seen arguing with her boyfriend or it happened 00:17:18.200 --> 00:17:20.039 in a high crime neighborhood. So it's victim 00:17:20.039 --> 00:17:22.099 blaming baked right into the reporting. It's 00:17:22.099 --> 00:17:24.500 pure victim blaming. The subtext shifts entirely. 00:17:24.680 --> 00:17:27.099 It's no longer this is a terrible tragedy. It 00:17:27.099 --> 00:17:29.940 becomes this is the unfortunate but perhaps predictable 00:17:29.940 --> 00:17:33.319 consequence of her lifestyle. Wow. And once you 00:17:33.319 --> 00:17:35.640 do that, you give the audience an out. You give 00:17:35.640 --> 00:17:37.990 them permission not to care. You absolutely do. 00:17:38.049 --> 00:17:40.329 You absolve them of the responsibility of empathy. 00:17:40.890 --> 00:17:43.910 Because if she's partly to blame, then we don't 00:17:43.910 --> 00:17:46.210 need to mount a national search party for her. 00:17:46.250 --> 00:17:48.609 It's not our problem anymore. It's tragic. But 00:17:48.609 --> 00:17:50.950 it's her tragedy, not ours. It's a way of stripping 00:17:50.950 --> 00:17:53.910 the humanity from the victim to justify our own 00:17:53.910 --> 00:17:56.589 inaction. And it feeds into this idea that Kim 00:17:56.589 --> 00:17:58.750 Pasqualini from the National Center for Missing 00:17:58.750 --> 00:18:00.869 Adults talked about. She called it the woman 00:18:00.869 --> 00:18:04.299 in jeopardy genre. A genre. Like, it's entertainment. 00:18:04.680 --> 00:18:06.740 Well, that's the uncomfortable truth, isn't it? 00:18:06.779 --> 00:18:09.299 We consume these stories like they're the latest 00:18:09.299 --> 00:18:11.619 season of a true crime docuseries. We watch them 00:18:11.619 --> 00:18:14.220 like episodes of Law & Order. And for that show 00:18:14.220 --> 00:18:16.960 to work, for the ratings to be good, you need 00:18:16.960 --> 00:18:19.119 a protagonist the audience can root for. You 00:18:19.119 --> 00:18:21.839 need the perfect damsel. It even applies outside 00:18:21.839 --> 00:18:24.180 of missing persons cases, doesn't it? I'm thinking 00:18:24.180 --> 00:18:26.539 of some of the huge murder trials. Amanda Knox. 00:18:27.440 --> 00:18:31.460 Jodi Arias. Casey Anthony. Oh, absolutely. That's 00:18:31.460 --> 00:18:33.480 the other side of the coin. Even when the young, 00:18:33.480 --> 00:18:36.079 attractive white woman is the accused, the villain 00:18:36.079 --> 00:18:38.799 of the story, she is still the star. She's still 00:18:38.799 --> 00:18:40.980 the center of the universe. The national obsession. 00:18:41.319 --> 00:18:44.660 We dissect her motives, her looks, her diary. 00:18:44.960 --> 00:18:47.640 We give her a primetime special, a Netflix deal. 00:18:48.380 --> 00:18:50.940 But a black woman accused of a similar crime. 00:18:51.140 --> 00:18:53.660 She's just a criminal. There's no glamour, no 00:18:53.660 --> 00:18:56.619 intrigue, no multi -part series exploring her 00:18:56.619 --> 00:18:59.490 psyche. The damsel can be in distress or she 00:18:59.490 --> 00:19:01.910 can be the femme fatale. But either way, she 00:19:01.910 --> 00:19:04.990 is always the main character. Always. And this 00:19:04.990 --> 00:19:07.730 is where we have to bring in the concept of intersectionality. 00:19:07.950 --> 00:19:09.630 I know it's a word that gets thrown around a 00:19:09.630 --> 00:19:12.349 lot, but it is the perfect analytical tool for 00:19:12.349 --> 00:19:14.549 this. It was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, right, 00:19:14.670 --> 00:19:17.549 to explain this exact kind of situation. Exactly. 00:19:18.029 --> 00:19:21.349 It explains why black women specifically fall 00:19:21.349 --> 00:19:23.930 through the tracks of our cultural concern. A 00:19:23.930 --> 00:19:26.730 black woman faces racism. which devalues her 00:19:26.730 --> 00:19:29.089 life in a society structured around whiteness. 00:19:29.170 --> 00:19:32.450 And she faces sexism, which makes all women vulnerable 00:19:32.450 --> 00:19:34.849 to certain types of violence. But it's a combination 00:19:34.849 --> 00:19:38.190 of the two. It's the compounding effect. She 00:19:38.190 --> 00:19:39.990 doesn't have the racial privilege that protects 00:19:39.990 --> 00:19:42.490 white women, and she doesn't have the male privilege 00:19:42.490 --> 00:19:46.150 that can, in some ways, shield men. She exists 00:19:46.150 --> 00:19:49.130 at the intersection of two forms of marginalization, 00:19:49.329 --> 00:19:51.569 and that intersection is a blind spot for the 00:19:51.569 --> 00:19:54.410 media. The place where nobody is looking. The 00:19:54.410 --> 00:19:56.230 place where nobody is looking. This is a good 00:19:56.230 --> 00:19:58.390 time to pivot to the comparative case studies 00:19:58.390 --> 00:20:01.170 because talking about it in theory is one thing, 00:20:01.170 --> 00:20:03.650 but when you see it happen in real time, it's 00:20:03.650 --> 00:20:06.069 undeniable. You've pulled some examples where 00:20:06.069 --> 00:20:08.309 it's like history ran its own A -B test. And 00:20:08.309 --> 00:20:09.910 the most famous one, the one that I think really 00:20:09.910 --> 00:20:12.089 opened a lot of people's eyes to this, is the 00:20:12.089 --> 00:20:15.470 case of Lacey Peterson in 2002. I remember that 00:20:15.470 --> 00:20:18.190 so vividly you couldn't escape it. Lacey Peterson. 00:20:19.190 --> 00:20:23.190 Modesto, California. 27 years old. White. Eight 00:20:23.190 --> 00:20:25.259 months pregnant. she disappears on Christmas 00:20:25.259 --> 00:20:27.440 Eve. Yeah. I mean, from a news producer's perspective, 00:20:27.640 --> 00:20:30.500 it had every possible element. The holiday angle, 00:20:30.619 --> 00:20:32.819 the beautiful victim, the handsome, suspicious 00:20:32.819 --> 00:20:35.920 husband, Scott Peterson. It was a perfect storm. 00:20:36.220 --> 00:20:38.500 CNN basically became the Lexi Peterson network 00:20:38.500 --> 00:20:41.779 for months on end. Absolutely. But at the exact 00:20:41.779 --> 00:20:44.339 same time, in the exact same part of the world, 00:20:44.460 --> 00:20:47.359 someone else disappeared. Yes. In that same year, 00:20:47.380 --> 00:20:49.940 in the Bay Area, a woman named Evelyn Hernandez 00:20:49.940 --> 00:20:53.220 went missing. Tell us about Evelyn. Evelyn Hernandez 00:20:53.220 --> 00:20:55.900 was a 24 -year -old Hispanic woman. She was also 00:20:55.900 --> 00:20:58.240 pregnant, nine months pregnant. She vanished 00:20:58.240 --> 00:21:00.660 from San Francisco just an hour's drive from 00:21:00.660 --> 00:21:03.279 Modesto. So an almost identical fact pattern. 00:21:03.380 --> 00:21:06.819 Young, heavily pregnant, Bay Area, vanishes without 00:21:06.819 --> 00:21:09.920 a trace. The parallels are uncanny. And they 00:21:09.920 --> 00:21:13.039 get even more tragic. Lacey Peterson's body was 00:21:13.039 --> 00:21:15.000 eventually discovered washed up in the San Francisco 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:17.500 Bay. Right, I remember that. Evelyn Hernandez's 00:21:17.500 --> 00:21:20.960 torso was also found washed ashore. In the San 00:21:20.960 --> 00:21:23.599 Francisco Bay. My God. It's the same story. It's 00:21:23.599 --> 00:21:26.119 the same story. But the coverage could not have 00:21:26.119 --> 00:21:28.259 been more different. Lacey Peterson became a 00:21:28.259 --> 00:21:30.880 household name. There were vigils, magazine covers, 00:21:31.059 --> 00:21:33.700 TV movies. There's literally a law named after 00:21:33.700 --> 00:21:36.299 her and her unborn son. And Evelyn Hernandez. 00:21:36.660 --> 00:21:39.920 A footnote. The local paper, the San Francisco 00:21:39.920 --> 00:21:42.480 Chronicle, actually wrote an article at the time 00:21:42.480 --> 00:21:45.059 pointing out the glaring disparity. But the national 00:21:45.059 --> 00:21:48.359 media just, they didn't care. She didn't fit 00:21:48.359 --> 00:21:50.160 the profile. What was different? Was it just 00:21:50.160 --> 00:21:52.460 that she was Hispanic? That was a huge part of 00:21:52.460 --> 00:21:55.299 it, of course. But her class and background also 00:21:55.299 --> 00:21:58.240 played a role. She was a single mother, an immigrant 00:21:58.240 --> 00:22:00.460 from El Salvador. She worked as a vocational 00:22:00.460 --> 00:22:03.200 nurse. She didn't have that polished, suburban, 00:22:03.480 --> 00:22:06.079 upper -middle -class life that Lacey did. She 00:22:06.079 --> 00:22:08.779 wasn't the perfect victim. So the media looked 00:22:08.779 --> 00:22:12.299 at her story and said, tragic, but not a blockbuster. 00:22:12.700 --> 00:22:14.880 And they looked at Lacey's story and saw ratings 00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:17.720 gold. That's the cold, hard truth of it. Let's 00:22:17.720 --> 00:22:20.759 jump forward a few years to 2005, the year of 00:22:20.759 --> 00:22:23.559 Natalie Holloway. The Aruba case, another one 00:22:23.559 --> 00:22:25.460 that was just everywhere. An 18 -year -old white 00:22:25.460 --> 00:22:28.180 girl from a wealthy suburb in Alabama goes missing 00:22:28.180 --> 00:22:30.839 on a high school graduation trip. It was an absolutely 00:22:30.839 --> 00:22:33.859 terrifying story, and it deserved coverage. But 00:22:33.859 --> 00:22:36.059 the scale of the coverage was astronomical. It 00:22:36.059 --> 00:22:38.019 was the story of the summer. I feel like some 00:22:38.019 --> 00:22:40.480 cable news anchors built their entire careers 00:22:40.480 --> 00:22:43.319 on that one story. It was on every single night 00:22:43.319 --> 00:22:46.500 for months. It was. But in that same exact summer 00:22:46.500 --> 00:22:49.460 in Philadelphia, a 25 -year -old woman named 00:22:49.460 --> 00:22:52.740 Latoya Figueroa disappeared. Okay. Latoya was 00:22:52.740 --> 00:22:55.059 black and Hispanic. She was five months pregnant. 00:22:55.200 --> 00:22:57.380 She was already a mother to a young daughter. 00:22:57.539 --> 00:23:00.740 And the coverage. Crickets. Absolute silence 00:23:00.740 --> 00:23:03.900 from the national media. Her family was screaming 00:23:03.900 --> 00:23:06.160 for help, trying to get anyone to pay attention. 00:23:06.599 --> 00:23:09.420 It wasn't until a few bloggers and local activists 00:23:09.420 --> 00:23:13.019 started raising hell online, specifically contrasting 00:23:13.019 --> 00:23:15.259 her case with the wall -to -wall coverage of 00:23:15.259 --> 00:23:18.059 Natalie Holloway, that the story got any traction. 00:23:18.220 --> 00:23:20.180 So they had to shame the media into covering 00:23:20.180 --> 00:23:22.640 it. They had to. And even then, when CNN finally 00:23:22.640 --> 00:23:24.380 did a segment, the segment itself was framed 00:23:24.380 --> 00:23:27.099 as, why is no one covering the LaToya Figueroa 00:23:27.099 --> 00:23:29.099 case? Oh, that's so cynical. Yeah. So they didn't 00:23:29.099 --> 00:23:31.099 just cover her story. They covered the controversy 00:23:31.099 --> 00:23:34.170 around the lack of coverage. Precisely. They 00:23:34.170 --> 00:23:36.450 made the metanarrative the story, instead of 00:23:36.450 --> 00:23:38.769 just centering the missing pregnant woman of 00:23:38.769 --> 00:23:41.009 color and helping her family find her. It was 00:23:41.009 --> 00:23:43.930 a brief moment of media self -reflection, but 00:23:43.930 --> 00:23:45.769 it didn't actually translate into sustained, 00:23:45.970 --> 00:23:49.609 intense coverage for Latoya herself. There's 00:23:49.609 --> 00:23:51.009 one more case in the section that I think is 00:23:51.009 --> 00:23:53.150 maybe the most bizarre and revealing of them 00:23:53.150 --> 00:23:56.549 all. Because it shows how this bias is so ingrained, 00:23:56.730 --> 00:23:59.589 the media will literally invent a crime to fit 00:23:59.589 --> 00:24:02.170 the narrative. This is the blonde angel case 00:24:02.170 --> 00:24:05.809 from Greece. Oh, this one is just, it's infuriating 00:24:05.809 --> 00:24:08.730 on every level. So this is 2013. Greek police 00:24:08.730 --> 00:24:11.730 conduct a raid on a Roma settlement, what many 00:24:11.730 --> 00:24:13.730 people would pejoratively call a gypsy camp. 00:24:13.930 --> 00:24:16.230 Okay. And inside one of the homes, they find 00:24:16.230 --> 00:24:18.650 a little girl. She's about four years old. And 00:24:18.650 --> 00:24:21.069 she has platinum blonde hair, fair skin and blue 00:24:21.069 --> 00:24:23.609 eyes. And she's living with a Roma family who 00:24:23.609 --> 00:24:26.089 are typically darker skinned. Exactly. And the 00:24:26.089 --> 00:24:28.769 police and then instantly the global media, they 00:24:28.769 --> 00:24:30.630 take one look at this little blonde child among 00:24:30.630 --> 00:24:32.869 these brown skinned people and they jump to a 00:24:32.869 --> 00:24:34.849 single immediate conclusion. She must have been 00:24:34.849 --> 00:24:37.089 kidnapped. She must be a stolen white child. 00:24:37.289 --> 00:24:40.069 They literally nicknamed her the blonde angel. 00:24:40.210 --> 00:24:43.549 The story went viral worldwide. Who is this lost 00:24:43.549 --> 00:24:46.910 little angel abducted by gypsies? It played into 00:24:46.910 --> 00:24:50.009 every single racist centuries -old stereotype 00:24:50.009 --> 00:24:52.450 you can imagine. And calls started pouring in 00:24:52.450 --> 00:24:54.490 from all over the world, Brad. Thousands of them. 00:24:54.529 --> 00:24:56.710 Parents of missing children from the U .S., from 00:24:56.710 --> 00:24:59.230 the U .K., from all over Europe were calling 00:24:59.230 --> 00:25:01.829 Greek authorities thinking maybe, just maybe, 00:25:02.049 --> 00:25:04.769 this was their long -lost daughter. So what was 00:25:04.769 --> 00:25:07.390 the actual truth? The truth came from a DNA test 00:25:07.390 --> 00:25:10.859 a few days later. The little girl was Roma. Her 00:25:10.859 --> 00:25:13.220 biological mother was an impoverished Roma woman 00:25:13.220 --> 00:25:15.839 from Bulgaria. The family she was living with 00:25:15.839 --> 00:25:17.859 hadn't kidnapped her. Her mother had given the 00:25:17.859 --> 00:25:19.799 child to them in an informal adoption because 00:25:19.799 --> 00:25:21.460 she couldn't afford to care for her. There was 00:25:21.460 --> 00:25:24.119 no crime. She wasn't a stolen white child at 00:25:24.119 --> 00:25:27.099 all. She was just a pale -skinned Roma girl living 00:25:27.099 --> 00:25:29.720 with other Roma people. The entire international 00:25:29.720 --> 00:25:32.920 news frenzy was a complete fabrication, built 00:25:32.920 --> 00:25:35.480 entirely on the color of a child's skin and hair. 00:25:36.329 --> 00:25:38.769 A Romani rights activist made such a powerful 00:25:38.769 --> 00:25:41.130 point at the time. He said, imagine the reverse. 00:25:41.490 --> 00:25:44.869 Imagine if police raided a wealthy white suburban 00:25:44.869 --> 00:25:47.849 home and found a brown -skinned child living 00:25:47.849 --> 00:25:50.150 there. They would never assume kidnapping. They'd 00:25:50.150 --> 00:25:52.349 assume the family adopted the child. Of course. 00:25:52.690 --> 00:25:55.890 That's the default assumption. Whiteness is coded 00:25:55.890 --> 00:25:59.049 as normal and rightful owner, while brownness 00:25:59.049 --> 00:26:02.599 is coded as suspicious and criminal. The blonde 00:26:02.599 --> 00:26:04.799 angel case is the ultimate proof that the media 00:26:04.799 --> 00:26:07.059 is so hungry for the missing white woman narrative 00:26:07.059 --> 00:26:09.799 that it will hallucinate one into existence even 00:26:09.799 --> 00:26:11.700 when it's not there. That's a perfect way to 00:26:11.700 --> 00:26:14.200 put it. The bias is so strong it actually hallucinates 00:26:14.200 --> 00:26:16.920 crimes that fit its worldview. Yes. Let's touch 00:26:16.920 --> 00:26:18.839 on one final comparison here because it takes 00:26:18.839 --> 00:26:20.920 the concept out of the realm of domestic crime 00:26:20.920 --> 00:26:23.839 and into war and military heroism. The story 00:26:23.839 --> 00:26:26.779 of Jessica Lynch. This is a masterclass in how 00:26:26.779 --> 00:26:28.759 narratives are constructed by the media and in 00:26:28.759 --> 00:26:31.430 this case by the military's PR machine. So it's 00:26:31.430 --> 00:26:34.750 2003, the early days of the Iraq War. An American 00:26:34.750 --> 00:26:37.589 Army convoy makes a wrong turn and gets ambushed. 00:26:37.589 --> 00:26:39.769 I remember this being one of the first big dramatic 00:26:39.769 --> 00:26:42.869 stories of that war. It was. And there are three 00:26:42.869 --> 00:26:45.650 female soldiers in one of the Humvees who are 00:26:45.650 --> 00:26:47.950 central to this story. There's Private Jessica 00:26:47.950 --> 00:26:51.450 Lynch, who is 19, white and blonde. There's Specialist 00:26:51.450 --> 00:26:53.650 Shoshana Johnson, who is black and a single mother. 00:26:54.009 --> 00:26:56.490 And there's Private First Class Lori Pistua, 00:26:56.650 --> 00:26:59.509 who is Hopi indigenous and also a single mother. 00:26:59.799 --> 00:27:01.519 All in the same vehicle, all in the same ambush. 00:27:01.599 --> 00:27:04.539 All in the same ambush. In the attack, Lori Pistua 00:27:04.539 --> 00:27:07.400 fought back fiercely but was killed. She became 00:27:07.400 --> 00:27:09.500 the first Native American woman in U .S. history 00:27:09.500 --> 00:27:12.180 to die in combat. Shoshana Johnson was shot in 00:27:12.180 --> 00:27:14.160 both of her ankles and taken as a prisoner of 00:27:14.160 --> 00:27:16.839 war. Jessica Lynch sustained serious injuries 00:27:16.839 --> 00:27:18.900 in the crash and was also taken prisoner. Three 00:27:18.900 --> 00:27:21.980 women, one killed, two captured, three heroes. 00:27:22.220 --> 00:27:24.839 But who did the media turn into a global icon? 00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:28.750 Jessica Lynch. And only Jessica Lynch. The initial 00:27:28.750 --> 00:27:31.750 reports, fueled by leaks in the Pentagon, painted 00:27:31.750 --> 00:27:34.849 her as this Rambo -like figure who went down 00:27:34.849 --> 00:27:37.390 fighting, firing her weapon until she was out 00:27:37.390 --> 00:27:39.890 of ammunition. They focused on her youth, her 00:27:39.890 --> 00:27:42.589 blonde hair, her small -town West Virginia roots. 00:27:42.829 --> 00:27:45.470 The perfect all -American girl hero. She was 00:27:45.470 --> 00:27:48.569 turned into a living legend overnight. But here's 00:27:48.569 --> 00:27:51.069 the most incredible part of the story. When Jessica 00:27:51.069 --> 00:27:53.690 Lynch was finally rescued and brought home, she 00:27:53.690 --> 00:27:56.240 refused to play along with the myth. Right. She 00:27:56.240 --> 00:27:58.420 herself pushed back against the hero narrative. 00:27:58.680 --> 00:28:01.579 She did, and with incredible courage. She testified 00:28:01.579 --> 00:28:03.819 before Congress, and she said, and I'm quoting 00:28:03.819 --> 00:28:06.680 her here, I am still confused as to why they 00:28:06.680 --> 00:28:09.880 chose to lie and tried to make me a legend. She 00:28:09.880 --> 00:28:12.480 explicitly used her platform to correct the record 00:28:12.480 --> 00:28:15.140 and to honor her fellow soldiers. He said people 00:28:15.140 --> 00:28:17.259 like Laurie Pistoie and Jashana Johnson were 00:28:17.259 --> 00:28:19.880 the real heroes that Laurie fought until the 00:28:19.880 --> 00:28:22.559 very end. It's just so powerful when the person 00:28:22.559 --> 00:28:24.960 who is being elevated by this biased system turns 00:28:24.960 --> 00:28:26.880 around and says, stop looking at me. Look at 00:28:26.880 --> 00:28:28.539 the people of color next to me whose stories 00:28:28.539 --> 00:28:30.900 you are erasing. It's the ultimate confirmation 00:28:30.900 --> 00:28:34.380 that this focus isn't accidental. It is a deliberate 00:28:34.380 --> 00:28:37.059 choice, a choice to center the white narrative, 00:28:37.140 --> 00:28:39.099 even on a battlefield where everyone is supposed 00:28:39.099 --> 00:28:41.480 to be wearing the same uniform. OK, so we've 00:28:41.480 --> 00:28:43.400 spent a lot of time on the U .S. context. Let's 00:28:43.400 --> 00:28:46.640 broaden the lens. Is this a uniquely American 00:28:46.640 --> 00:28:49.410 problem? Or is this something that we see in 00:28:49.410 --> 00:28:51.890 other Western countries as well? It is absolutely 00:28:51.890 --> 00:28:54.069 an international phenomenon, especially in countries 00:28:54.069 --> 00:28:56.890 with similar racial and colonial histories. You 00:28:56.890 --> 00:28:59.329 see the same patterns play out in the UK, in 00:28:59.329 --> 00:29:02.049 Canada, even in a place like South Africa. All 00:29:02.049 --> 00:29:03.930 right, let's go to the UK first. What's the parallel 00:29:03.930 --> 00:29:06.470 there? In the UK, the most frequently cited example 00:29:06.470 --> 00:29:09.849 is the stark contrast between the Soham murders 00:29:09.849 --> 00:29:12.390 and the murder of a boy named Damalola Taylor. 00:29:12.930 --> 00:29:14.690 Okay, can you remind us of the details of those 00:29:14.690 --> 00:29:18.579 cases? The Soham murders happened in 2002. Two 00:29:18.579 --> 00:29:21.079 10 year old white girls, Holly Wells and Jessica 00:29:21.079 --> 00:29:23.660 Chapman, were murdered by a school caretaker. 00:29:23.759 --> 00:29:26.279 It was a national trauma. The entire country 00:29:26.279 --> 00:29:28.599 came to a standstill. The media coverage was 00:29:28.599 --> 00:29:31.019 just absolute saturation for weeks and weeks. 00:29:32.160 --> 00:29:34.000 That's understandable. The murder of two 10 year 00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:37.319 olds is a horrific story. It is a horrific story. 00:29:37.680 --> 00:29:41.279 But in that same general time period in 2000, 00:29:41.559 --> 00:29:44.740 a 10 year old black boy named Jamalola Taylor 00:29:44.740 --> 00:29:47.259 was stabbed to death on his way home from the 00:29:47.259 --> 00:29:50.599 library in South London. Another horrific story. 00:29:50.779 --> 00:29:54.140 And the media reaction. It was so muted in comparison 00:29:54.140 --> 00:29:56.960 that it actually caused a public scandal. The 00:29:56.960 --> 00:30:00.579 disparity was so obvious and so offensive that. 00:30:00.940 --> 00:30:02.960 Sir Ian Blair, who was the commissioner of the 00:30:02.960 --> 00:30:04.559 Metropolitan Police, so we're talking about the 00:30:04.559 --> 00:30:07.119 top police officer in all of London, he publicly 00:30:07.119 --> 00:30:09.059 called out the media for it. The head of the 00:30:09.059 --> 00:30:11.579 police called them out. Yes. He flat out accused 00:30:11.579 --> 00:30:14.559 the British press of institutional racism. He 00:30:14.559 --> 00:30:17.140 said, quote, It is a simple fact that murders 00:30:17.140 --> 00:30:19.420 in minority communities do not seem to interest 00:30:19.420 --> 00:30:22.000 the mainstream media. He talked about how he 00:30:22.000 --> 00:30:24.400 had to practically beg for coverage for Damolola 00:30:24.400 --> 00:30:27.279 Taylor while the Soham girls were rightly, on 00:30:27.279 --> 00:30:29.400 every front page every single day. To have the 00:30:29.400 --> 00:30:31.559 head of the police say that, that's an incredible 00:30:31.559 --> 00:30:34.119 admission from inside the system. It's a damning 00:30:34.119 --> 00:30:36.519 indictment. And you see another level of this 00:30:36.519 --> 00:30:39.660 in the UK with class, too. People contrast the 00:30:39.660 --> 00:30:42.680 coverage of Millie Dowler, a white middle -class 00:30:42.680 --> 00:30:45.160 schoolgirl who was murdered, with that of Hannah 00:30:45.160 --> 00:30:47.619 Williams, a white working -class girl who was 00:30:47.619 --> 00:30:50.619 also murdered. Hannah had a nose cut, estranged 00:30:50.619 --> 00:30:53.599 parents. She didn't fit the perfect victim profile, 00:30:53.720 --> 00:30:56.960 and her case got far less attention. So it's 00:30:56.960 --> 00:30:59.339 that same intersection of race and class and 00:30:59.339 --> 00:31:01.579 perceived innocence playing out there, too. Exactly 00:31:01.579 --> 00:31:03.900 the same. OK, what about Canada? In Canada, the 00:31:03.900 --> 00:31:06.359 conversation is dominated by the crisis of missing 00:31:06.359 --> 00:31:09.079 and murdered indigenous women and girls, often 00:31:09.079 --> 00:31:12.859 abbreviated as MMIWG. This has become a huge 00:31:12.859 --> 00:31:15.579 national issue in Canada in recent years, a focus 00:31:15.579 --> 00:31:17.859 of their truth and reconciliation effort. It 00:31:17.859 --> 00:31:21.319 has, finally. But for decades upon decades, it 00:31:21.319 --> 00:31:23.799 was a silent epidemic. And the research on the 00:31:23.799 --> 00:31:26.170 media disparity there is just... Staggering. 00:31:26.390 --> 00:31:29.170 A 2008 study looked at the data and found that 00:31:29.170 --> 00:31:31.250 an indigenous woman who goes missing in Canada 00:31:31.250 --> 00:31:34.529 receives, on average, 27 times less newspaper 00:31:34.529 --> 00:31:37.089 coverage than a missing white woman. Wait, say 00:31:37.089 --> 00:31:39.309 that number again. 27 times less. That's not 00:31:39.309 --> 00:31:41.750 a gap. That's a black hole. It's a complete erasure. 00:31:42.289 --> 00:31:44.990 And the study also analyzed the tone of the coverage. 00:31:45.410 --> 00:31:47.470 It found that the few articles that were written 00:31:47.470 --> 00:31:50.569 about missing indigenous women were brief, dispassionate, 00:31:50.569 --> 00:31:54.130 and read like a police report. Woman, age 32, 00:31:54.369 --> 00:31:57.250 missing. Last seen wearing a blue jacket. Just 00:31:57.250 --> 00:32:00.609 the facts. No humanity. Zero humanity. But the 00:32:00.609 --> 00:32:03.049 articles about missing white women were overflowing 00:32:03.049 --> 00:32:06.250 with it. They were emotional, detailed, filled 00:32:06.250 --> 00:32:08.730 with quotes from family and friends talking about 00:32:08.730 --> 00:32:10.950 her dreams and her personality. It's the difference 00:32:10.950 --> 00:32:13.109 between reporting on a lost item and reporting 00:32:13.109 --> 00:32:16.089 on a lost human being. That's precisely it. And 00:32:16.089 --> 00:32:19.190 finally, let's look at South Africa. This one 00:32:19.190 --> 00:32:21.150 is really interesting because it's a black majority 00:32:21.150 --> 00:32:24.289 country. But the legacy of apartheid means that 00:32:24.289 --> 00:32:27.009 media ownership and cultural power still often 00:32:27.009 --> 00:32:29.869 reflect the old racial hierarchy. And the case 00:32:29.869 --> 00:32:32.450 that brings this into focus is the Oster Pistorius 00:32:32.450 --> 00:32:35.450 trial. Right. The Blade Runner, a global celebrity 00:32:35.450 --> 00:32:38.269 who murdered his girlfriend, Reva Steenkamp, 00:32:38.349 --> 00:32:41.230 a famous white model. It became the O .J. Simpson 00:32:41.230 --> 00:32:43.730 trial of South Africa. It was broadcast live 00:32:43.730 --> 00:32:45.789 around the world. But there is a parallel case 00:32:45.789 --> 00:32:49.250 there as well. Yes. At roughly the same time, 00:32:49.369 --> 00:32:52.490 another beautiful South African model named Zanella 00:32:52.490 --> 00:32:55.029 Kumalo was brutally murdered by her boyfriend 00:32:55.029 --> 00:32:57.250 under very similar circumstances. Let me guess. 00:32:57.430 --> 00:33:00.250 She was black and the story got no international 00:33:00.250 --> 00:33:03.009 attention. Not only no international attention, 00:33:03.190 --> 00:33:05.349 but very little sustained national attention 00:33:05.349 --> 00:33:08.349 in South Africa itself. A South African government 00:33:08.349 --> 00:33:11.890 official named Sandal Mumla wrote this scathing 00:33:11.890 --> 00:33:14.109 op -ed about it. He said the media's obsession 00:33:14.109 --> 00:33:16.950 with the white victim. Steenkamp, while ignoring 00:33:16.950 --> 00:33:19.470 the agony of the black victim's family, the Kamala 00:33:19.470 --> 00:33:23.130 family, amounted to structural racism. He argued 00:33:23.130 --> 00:33:24.829 that even in a country where black people are 00:33:24.829 --> 00:33:27.410 the vast majority, the media still operates as 00:33:27.410 --> 00:33:29.390 if a white life is inherently more valuable and 00:33:29.390 --> 00:33:32.269 more newsworthy. It's devastating how consistent 00:33:32.269 --> 00:33:34.410 the pattern is. No matter the country, no matter 00:33:34.410 --> 00:33:37.109 the context, the hierarchy seems to hold. It 00:33:37.109 --> 00:33:39.309 does. Which brings us to what is maybe the most 00:33:39.309 --> 00:33:41.450 critical part of this whole deep dive, the so 00:33:41.450 --> 00:33:43.670 what question. It's easy to hear all this and 00:33:43.670 --> 00:33:45.329 think, OK, the media. Media is biased. That's 00:33:45.329 --> 00:33:47.470 terrible. But is it just about what's on TV? 00:33:47.650 --> 00:33:50.450 Does it actually have tangible real world consequences? 00:33:50.789 --> 00:33:53.670 Does it change the law? Does it change how police 00:33:53.670 --> 00:33:55.930 departments allocate resources? It absolutely 00:33:55.930 --> 00:33:58.089 changes the world. And the most obvious way it 00:33:58.089 --> 00:34:01.069 does that is through legislation. Public outrage 00:34:01.069 --> 00:34:04.250 driven by intense media coverage is one of the 00:34:04.250 --> 00:34:07.130 most powerful forces in politics. When the public 00:34:07.130 --> 00:34:09.250 is screaming about a particular type of crime, 00:34:09.489 --> 00:34:13.050 politicians respond. They pass laws. And they 00:34:13.050 --> 00:34:15.349 often name those laws after the victims who were 00:34:15.349 --> 00:34:18.170 at the center of the media firestorm. Let's just 00:34:18.170 --> 00:34:21.110 list a few. Megan's Law. Named after Megan Conka, 00:34:21.210 --> 00:34:24.150 a young white girl. Jess's Law. Named after Jessica 00:34:24.150 --> 00:34:26.869 Lunsford, a young white girl. Kaylee's Law. Named 00:34:26.869 --> 00:34:29.210 after Kaylee Anthony, a young white girl. Lacey 00:34:29.210 --> 00:34:31.190 and Connor's Law. Named after Lacey Peterson, 00:34:31.510 --> 00:34:34.769 a white woman, and her unborn son. You see the 00:34:34.769 --> 00:34:37.769 pattern. It's undeniable. It is. These named 00:34:37.769 --> 00:34:40.389 laws are almost always tough on crime measures. 00:34:40.610 --> 00:34:43.190 They create sex offender registries. They impose 00:34:43.190 --> 00:34:45.670 mandatory minimum sentences. They increase penalties. 00:34:46.050 --> 00:34:49.429 There are legislative responses born out of a 00:34:49.429 --> 00:34:52.449 moral panic that is laser focused on the perceived 00:34:52.449 --> 00:34:55.429 threat to white women and children. So because 00:34:55.429 --> 00:34:58.909 the media elevates the stories of this one demographic. 00:34:59.690 --> 00:35:02.469 Our entire legal framework for dealing with these 00:35:02.469 --> 00:35:05.329 crimes gets built around protecting that specific 00:35:05.329 --> 00:35:08.489 demographic. 100 percent. Meanwhile, the systemic 00:35:08.489 --> 00:35:10.469 issues that lead to the disproportionate disappearance 00:35:10.469 --> 00:35:12.949 and murder of black women or indigenous women, 00:35:13.050 --> 00:35:16.070 things like poverty, domestic violence, lack 00:35:16.070 --> 00:35:19.730 of social services, police indifference. Those 00:35:19.730 --> 00:35:21.869 issues don't get the breaking news treatment, 00:35:21.989 --> 00:35:23.969 so they don't get the named legislation. And 00:35:23.969 --> 00:35:26.030 beyond the laws themselves, it has to affect 00:35:26.030 --> 00:35:28.329 the actual searches on the ground, the allocation 00:35:28.329 --> 00:35:31.559 of police. FaceTime, money, resources. Massively. 00:35:31.760 --> 00:35:34.400 There was a study done in 2020 by the Wyoming 00:35:34.400 --> 00:35:37.260 Urban Indian Health Institute that looked specifically 00:35:37.260 --> 00:35:39.619 at missing indigenous people. It found that media 00:35:39.619 --> 00:35:41.940 outlets were far less likely to run a profile 00:35:41.940 --> 00:35:44.239 of a missing indigenous person while the search 00:35:44.239 --> 00:35:46.659 was still active. So they only get coverage after 00:35:46.659 --> 00:35:49.320 they're found dead. Often, yes, which is obviously 00:35:49.320 --> 00:35:51.440 too late. The entire point of the media coverage 00:35:51.440 --> 00:35:53.739 is to generate tips to help find the person alive. 00:35:54.099 --> 00:35:56.300 But this study found a detail that just floored 00:35:56.300 --> 00:35:58.739 me. It found that the few articles that were 00:35:58.739 --> 00:36:00.820 written about missing indigenous people were 00:36:00.820 --> 00:36:04.239 significantly less likely to even include a photograph 00:36:04.239 --> 00:36:06.820 of the missing person. Wait, how can you run 00:36:06.820 --> 00:36:09.480 a missing person story without a photo? That 00:36:09.480 --> 00:36:11.739 is the single most important piece of information. 00:36:12.159 --> 00:36:14.820 Have you seen this person is the entire point. 00:36:15.130 --> 00:36:18.510 It's malpractice. Or if there was a photo, it 00:36:18.510 --> 00:36:21.289 was often a grainy, low quality image, sometimes 00:36:21.289 --> 00:36:24.030 even a mugshot, which further criminalizes the 00:36:24.030 --> 00:36:27.010 victim. Meanwhile, the missing white victim gets 00:36:27.010 --> 00:36:29.409 the beautiful high resolution professional portrait 00:36:29.409 --> 00:36:33.030 or the smiling graduation photo. You are actively 00:36:33.030 --> 00:36:36.030 sabotaging the search effort by failing to humanize 00:36:36.030 --> 00:36:38.250 the victim for the public. And then when no tips 00:36:38.250 --> 00:36:39.710 come in, the police can say, well, there are 00:36:39.710 --> 00:36:42.530 no leads. It becomes this tragic, self -fulfilling 00:36:42.530 --> 00:36:44.909 prophecy of neglect. So let's try to wrap this 00:36:44.909 --> 00:36:47.590 all up. We've covered a ton of ground here. We 00:36:47.590 --> 00:36:49.989 started with Gwen Ifill giving this phenomenon 00:36:49.989 --> 00:36:52.769 a name. We looked at the hard data that proves 00:36:52.769 --> 00:36:55.429 the disparity is real. We broke down the psychology 00:36:55.429 --> 00:36:58.230 of the damsel narrative. We saw it in action 00:36:58.230 --> 00:37:00.250 with case studies from the U .S. and all around 00:37:00.250 --> 00:37:03.530 the world. And now we see how it literally shapes 00:37:03.530 --> 00:37:06.789 our laws and our police work. It's a powerful, 00:37:06.869 --> 00:37:09.829 self -perpetuating system. It's not about one 00:37:09.829 --> 00:37:13.050 bad producer making one bad call. It's a deep 00:37:13.050 --> 00:37:15.590 -seated cultural habit. So what's the takeaway 00:37:15.590 --> 00:37:17.230 for the person who's been listening to all this, 00:37:17.289 --> 00:37:18.829 the person back on that couch where we started? 00:37:19.170 --> 00:37:21.469 What do we do with this information? I think 00:37:21.469 --> 00:37:23.510 the biggest thing is to become a more conscious, 00:37:23.570 --> 00:37:26.909 more critical consumer of media. The news business, 00:37:27.050 --> 00:37:29.690 at the end of the day, is a business. They're 00:37:29.690 --> 00:37:31.829 chasing our eyeballs, our clicks, our attention. 00:37:32.170 --> 00:37:34.750 We vote with our remote control or with our thumb 00:37:34.750 --> 00:37:37.769 on the screen. We absolutely do. And if we, the 00:37:37.769 --> 00:37:40.940 audience, only show interest in the serialized 00:37:40.940 --> 00:37:44.239 drama of the missing white cheerleader, then 00:37:44.239 --> 00:37:46.079 that's the only story they're ever going to tell. 00:37:46.440 --> 00:37:48.699 We have to be aware of a couple of cognitive 00:37:48.699 --> 00:37:51.940 biases that the research points to. One is the 00:37:51.940 --> 00:37:53.880 availability heuristic. Can you give us the quick 00:37:53.880 --> 00:37:56.650 definition of that? The availability heuristic 00:37:56.650 --> 00:37:59.769 is our brain's tendency to judge how common something 00:37:59.769 --> 00:38:02.489 is based on how easily we can think of an example 00:38:02.489 --> 00:38:04.809 of it. So if you see stories about missing white 00:38:04.809 --> 00:38:07.030 women on the news every single night. Your brain 00:38:07.030 --> 00:38:09.010 concludes that missing white women must be the 00:38:09.010 --> 00:38:11.489 most common and pressing crisis, even if the 00:38:11.489 --> 00:38:13.489 objective data says that indigenous women or 00:38:13.489 --> 00:38:15.769 black men are going missing at a much higher 00:38:15.769 --> 00:38:18.730 rate. Your reality is shaped by what's readily 00:38:18.730 --> 00:38:20.909 available in your memory, which is shaped by 00:38:20.909 --> 00:38:23.250 the media. And the other one was mean world syndrome. 00:38:23.630 --> 00:38:25.789 Yeah, that's the idea that heavy consumption 00:38:25.789 --> 00:38:28.630 of media, particularly crime news, leads you 00:38:28.630 --> 00:38:30.590 to believe the world is a much more dangerous 00:38:30.590 --> 00:38:33.469 and frightened place than it actually is. But 00:38:33.469 --> 00:38:35.469 specifically, it makes you believe it's more 00:38:35.469 --> 00:38:38.650 dangerous for the people you see being victimized 00:38:38.650 --> 00:38:41.849 on screen. It creates this misplaced sense of 00:38:41.849 --> 00:38:44.510 fear and anxiety. So the final thought here is 00:38:44.510 --> 00:38:46.449 that the next time you see that red breaking 00:38:46.449 --> 00:38:49.050 news banner with a smiling face. You have to 00:38:49.050 --> 00:38:50.889 stop for a second and ask yourself a question. 00:38:51.230 --> 00:38:53.690 It's not why am I seeing this story? It's who 00:38:53.690 --> 00:38:57.070 am I not seeing? Whose disappearance today didn't 00:38:57.070 --> 00:38:59.909 merit a breaking news banner? Is the world really 00:38:59.909 --> 00:39:02.550 most dangerous for the person on my screen? Or 00:39:02.550 --> 00:39:04.849 is the media spotlight just stuck in one place, 00:39:05.010 --> 00:39:07.590 reinforcing a hierarchy of human value that we 00:39:07.590 --> 00:39:10.010 need to challenge? It's realizing that what we 00:39:10.010 --> 00:39:12.750 see isn't the whole picture. It's a curated slice 00:39:12.750 --> 00:39:15.329 of reality. And once you see that, you can't 00:39:15.329 --> 00:39:18.309 unsee it. And recognizing that hierarchy is always 00:39:18.309 --> 00:39:20.929 the first step to dismantling it. This was a 00:39:20.929 --> 00:39:23.230 heavy one, but a really important one. Thank 00:39:23.230 --> 00:39:25.329 you for taking this deep dive with us. Absolutely. 00:39:25.469 --> 00:39:27.469 The key is to just keep questioning the narrative. 00:39:27.809 --> 00:39:28.789 We'll see you next time.