Missing White Woman Syndrome

After reading Lesko's piece I think there is a lot to unpack. There are a lot of things that I have thought about in the past as well as things that I believed to be true while I was growing up. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary coming-of-age is defined as "the attainment of prominence, respectability, recognition or maturity." I don't know about anyone else, but I definitely feel as though I am not even close to attaining that level of respectability or even recognition in many areas of my life. One area in particular is my workplace. I work at RIC as a full-time staff member and more times than not I have been mistaken for a student (which is half true because I am a grad student lol). One recent example is when I reserved a classroom for a meeting on the same night each week. The second week we met, another staff member was questioning whether or not we had reserved the space amongst other things. When I had spoken up and said that I was also a staff member, and I reserved the space their demeanor quickly changed. They apologized and swiftly left the room. It frustrates me because the way they were questioning the students it made it seem as though they did something wrong and did not belong using that space. Ageism is real and I see the way college students are not taken seriously by the "adults" (aka the faculty and staff members) at RIC. I have been in meetings where faculty and staff members will talk down about the students and discredit them in many different ways and it makes my blood boil. I find it hard some days to speak up because at the end of the day this is my job but my job is to also advocate for the students I am working with and representing.

These articles also had me thinking about the phrase "boys will be boys". How it is ok for boys to fight, play toy guns and act out because they are "boys". I feel as though there is a bigger expectation on young girls to be the opposite. When a little girl acts out or fights she is looked at as wild or bossy. This also leads me into unpacking the video "But I'm just a Kid": The Adultification of Black Girls This video opened my eyes to many things but one thing in particular stood out, the "missing white woman syndrome". When the media was covering the case of Gabby Petito I noticed comments on posts like "what about this BIPOC woman who has been missing for 2 years that was in a similar situation" or "what about the hundreds of thousands of BIPOC women that have been missing and still continue to go missing". It is so true how BIPOC women and even children do not get the same media coverage as a white woman or girl who goes missing. Missing White Woman Syndrome Explained (grunge.com) Going off of this too, I find it disgusting that R. Kelly got away with everything he did to young black women over YEARS and YEARS! The woman in the video is right when she says "what if those children and young women were white?" the media would have put so much attention to this that it would have been stopped before it could even start. Another statistic that left me mind blown and my heart hurting was that "1 in 4 black girls are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. That statistic is scary and if that doesn't make your jaw drop I don't know what will. I also found this article that is pretty powerful How The Adultification Of Black Girls Allowed R. Kelly’s Decades Of Abuse | HuffPost Voices