A year ago, May 7, Stacy-Ann Sappleton took a taxi to Queens, N.Y., from LaGuardia, bound for the home of her future in-laws. She had flown in from Detroit to complete a few tasks for her planned September wedding. She never made it. Her fiance, Damion Blair, his parents and Sappleton's mother spent a frantic weekend searching before they learned of her tragic demise.
Never heard of her? Neither has most of America.
Like runaway Georgia bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Sappleton was missing for three days. Like Wilbanks, Sappleton was young (26), middle-class and planning a wedding.
Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton's disappearance didn't receive 24-hour cable news coverage, complete with breathless speculation by celebrity pundits, or banner newspaper headlines. Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton was black.
The frenzy surrounding Wilbanks' disappearance once again highlights a peculiar feature of early 21st-century American culture: a fixation on pretty, young, middle-class white women. While tens of thousands of American adults disappear every year -- some eventually turn up, safe and sound; some are never heard from again; some are recovered as corpses -- only a small sliver get the Wilbanks/ Laci Peterson/Lori Hacking treatment.
After Sappleton's battered, bullet-riddled body was found in a Dumpster in Queens, about five miles from the home of her future in-laws, her fiance angrily refused to talk to reporters. "When she first disappeared, we tried to contact the media, and they wouldn't help us," Blair told The New York Times.
(Print and broadcast reporters from New York City and Canada -- Sappleton lived in Ontario -- covered her disappearance, but newspapers did not display the story prominently. There was little, if any, national coverage.)
Heaven knows, my industry ought to come in for a heaping dose of criticism for the sensationalist coverage given to one small drama -- the Wilbanks disappearance -- without broader societal implications. But the fact is that the runaway-bride soap opera, like the tragedies involving Peterson and Hacking, attracted loads of interest from readers and viewers.
As American news consumers, we are discriminating about the sort of victims worthy of our concern. Pretty, middle-class, young, white -- yes; old, ugly, poor, black, brown -- apparently not.
Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen says we may lack the ability to empathize with those we view as different from ourselves. "It's probably more clear who we're not interested in than who we are," he said.
"The number of people who are still living in horrible conditions after the tsunami, the number of people dying daily in Darfur ... those clearly eclipse Laci Peterson, (Terri) Schiavo, the runaway bride. But the media attention paid to the latter is probably a thousand-, two-thousand-fold" that paid to the larger tragedies.
Westen added: "I've wondered for a long time whether the ability to empathize with someone who has a skin color or culture or language different from our own takes not just an effort but a deliberate suppression of mechanisms that lead us to have an immediate reaction of repulsion or lack of interest. ... There are now clear data that show that when seemingly low-prejudiced whites see black faces, there is an automatic association with negatives."
There are, no doubt, black and brown celebrities whose travails draw intense interest. Think O.J. and M.J. -- or Wacko and Jacko -- both troubled has-beens who found themselves in criminal court. And if Halle Berry or Rosario Dawson disappeared, Fox News' Greta Van Susteren and CNN's Nancy Grace would go into overdrive, sending out their rapid deployment teams. In this country, celebrity trumps everything else.
But the tragedies of ordinary women of color lack the cachet that provokes intense interest, sympathy or even simple voyeurism. That's too bad. No arrests have been made in the Sappleton case; police are baffled. (Her fiance was in Detroit at the time of her disappearance and was ruled out as a suspect.)
If Greta and Nancy are interested in justice, and not just ratings, they'd devote some time to Sappleton's story. She, too, was a young woman hopeful about the future. Her loved ones, too, deserve some answers.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/ucas/20050508/cm_ucas/forgetmediaattentionifyourepoorblackuglyorold
Never heard of her? Neither has most of America.
Like runaway Georgia bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Sappleton was missing for three days. Like Wilbanks, Sappleton was young (26), middle-class and planning a wedding.
Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton's disappearance didn't receive 24-hour cable news coverage, complete with breathless speculation by celebrity pundits, or banner newspaper headlines. Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton was black.
The frenzy surrounding Wilbanks' disappearance once again highlights a peculiar feature of early 21st-century American culture: a fixation on pretty, young, middle-class white women. While tens of thousands of American adults disappear every year -- some eventually turn up, safe and sound; some are never heard from again; some are recovered as corpses -- only a small sliver get the Wilbanks/ Laci Peterson/Lori Hacking treatment.
After Sappleton's battered, bullet-riddled body was found in a Dumpster in Queens, about five miles from the home of her future in-laws, her fiance angrily refused to talk to reporters. "When she first disappeared, we tried to contact the media, and they wouldn't help us," Blair told The New York Times.
(Print and broadcast reporters from New York City and Canada -- Sappleton lived in Ontario -- covered her disappearance, but newspapers did not display the story prominently. There was little, if any, national coverage.)
Heaven knows, my industry ought to come in for a heaping dose of criticism for the sensationalist coverage given to one small drama -- the Wilbanks disappearance -- without broader societal implications. But the fact is that the runaway-bride soap opera, like the tragedies involving Peterson and Hacking, attracted loads of interest from readers and viewers.
As American news consumers, we are discriminating about the sort of victims worthy of our concern. Pretty, middle-class, young, white -- yes; old, ugly, poor, black, brown -- apparently not.
Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen says we may lack the ability to empathize with those we view as different from ourselves. "It's probably more clear who we're not interested in than who we are," he said.
"The number of people who are still living in horrible conditions after the tsunami, the number of people dying daily in Darfur ... those clearly eclipse Laci Peterson, (Terri) Schiavo, the runaway bride. But the media attention paid to the latter is probably a thousand-, two-thousand-fold" that paid to the larger tragedies.
Westen added: "I've wondered for a long time whether the ability to empathize with someone who has a skin color or culture or language different from our own takes not just an effort but a deliberate suppression of mechanisms that lead us to have an immediate reaction of repulsion or lack of interest. ... There are now clear data that show that when seemingly low-prejudiced whites see black faces, there is an automatic association with negatives."
There are, no doubt, black and brown celebrities whose travails draw intense interest. Think O.J. and M.J. -- or Wacko and Jacko -- both troubled has-beens who found themselves in criminal court. And if Halle Berry or Rosario Dawson disappeared, Fox News' Greta Van Susteren and CNN's Nancy Grace would go into overdrive, sending out their rapid deployment teams. In this country, celebrity trumps everything else.
But the tragedies of ordinary women of color lack the cachet that provokes intense interest, sympathy or even simple voyeurism. That's too bad. No arrests have been made in the Sappleton case; police are baffled. (Her fiance was in Detroit at the time of her disappearance and was ruled out as a suspect.)
If Greta and Nancy are interested in justice, and not just ratings, they'd devote some time to Sappleton's story. She, too, was a young woman hopeful about the future. Her loved ones, too, deserve some answers.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/ucas/20050508/cm_ucas/forgetmediaattentionifyourepoorblackuglyorold
