The Long American History of "Missing White Woman Syndrome"
The true-crime scholar Jean Murley discusses the Gabby Petito case and what's behind our fascination with certain kinds of victims.
By Helen Rosner
October 8, 2021
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-long-american-history-of-missing-white-woman-syndrome
Last month, the disappearance of the twenty-two-year-old Gabby Petito became a sensation, attracting play-by-play coverage in the news and avid amateur sleuthing on social media. At the same time, the national fascination with Petito's case sparked a debate about the nature of the fascination itself. The photos of Petito that filled our screens showed an attractive, blond, young white woman who radiated the curated happiness of a social-media native, and critics noted that coverage of her disappearance -- and the subsequent identification, in Wyoming, of her remains -- dwarfed the attention that both the media and law enforcement pay to other missing and murdered people, especially those who are Black and indigenous. (A report from earlier this year by the University of Wyoming showed that, in the past decade, seven hundred and ten indigenous people were reported missing in the state.) The Petito case, which is still unfolding (her fiancé, with whom she'd been travelling, is believed to be in hiding) seemed like another instance of what the late journalist Gwen Ifill famously described as "missing white woman syndrome": a hunger for stories about victims who look like Petito, to the exclusion of all others.
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That's an undeniable fact. There's something about the missing young, beautiful white woman that has a lot of symbolic weight in America. It's an aberration, and it becomes a container for things like the loss of innocence or the death of purity. This has a long historical trajectory, starting with the lost colony of Roanoke, Virginia. That was the birthplace of the first Englishwoman born in America, a little girl called Virginia Dare. That character of Baby Virginia has been mythologized and heavily inscribed with all sorts of meaning. No one ever knew what happened to the colony she was a member of, and so she has come to stand for the dangers of America, the dangers of the wilderness -- that history starts with the missing white child, Virginia Dare.
Then we've got frontier captivity narratives, particularly in New England and the Northeast. When white settlers began to infringe upon Native lands and upon the people who were here, sometimes the Natives would take captives. Often, if the captive was a woman, the interest in and fears around that particular story became very great, very amplified. So we have these books that appear by the eighteenth century called captivity narratives -- they would tell the story of a woman who was abducted by a group of Natives, and lived with a particular tribe, and then she comes back -- sometimes, not always. You also see this trope of the missing white woman in the post-Reconstruction era, in films like "The Birth of a Nation," which narrated the dangers posed to Southern white womanhood at the hands of Black male predators -- formerly enslaved people who were positioned as a complete sexual and physical danger to, primarily, white women. So it's not a surprise that we still have this symbol of the missing white woman. It has a deep history -- it's fraught with a lot of meaning for the American imaginary.
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It is. What's also shifted around with true crime in terms of race is that, while we have the same missing-white-woman character as a symbol -- recognizing, of course, that these are real people and real stories, but the way they pick up representational weight shifts -- what we've got now are white victims and white perpetrators. It's very rare, in the true-crime world, that a white woman is endangered by a Black man. The story that gets picked up and amplified is a white female victim and a white male. While we definitely have the captivity narratives and fears around Black men, in the South in particular, true crime is really interested in white victims and white perpetrators.
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