How America Fails Black Girls
By MORGAN JERKINS MARCH 29, 2017
Last Wednesday in Washington, hundreds of people crowded into a town-hall meeting about the district’s many missing black and Latino kids. A photo of the event, circulated on Twitter the following morning, showed that nearly all the attendees were black.
A little over two months ago, millions of women, men and gender-nonconforming people of all races came together in the same city in support of women’s rights, workers’ rights, racial equality, freedom of speech, immigration reform and more. The online magazine Clutch and others have noted the disjunction between the march and the meeting. Had it not been for countless black people on social media sharing information, the white mainstream media would have ignored the issue altogether.The meeting grew out of a claim that 14 black girls vanished in the nation’s capital in a single day, made in an image that spread on social media last week, that turned out to be untrue.