Season 1 – Black and Missing

Audience Reviews

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11/28/2021 Everyone has to be careful what they say here out of risk of appearing unsympathetic but the truth is, the documentary wasn't very good. My poor rating has zero reflection of the topic discussed. See more susan j @CallMeLulu 11/25/2021 Important topic--extremely well-meaning documentary that unfortunately is sloppy, meandering, convoluted, and whipped around by its ballistic rage and blurry accusations. It is warmly told, to it's credit--it certainly didn't need to be cold or academic--but it's tragically lacking any intellectual structure or rigor, so it ends up sophomoric, as if a smart but not yet well-educated or -seasoned 16-year-old made it, and no advisor was there to edit it and make it coherent. "Black and Missing" conflates 5-6 loosely related issues having to do with African American people who "go missing," but all under markedly different circumstances. The problem is it glosses over how the circumstances are--and are not at all--like one another. There's this and also this and then this over here and some other stuff happened that's sorta similar and we all know this kinda thing always happens to us, and nobody else because they hate us, oh and this other thing had happened this one other time, etc. Case Study 1: a woman in her 50s "doesn't know who I am or how I got to where I am" and through complicated, and hard to follow, meandering circumstances this woman learns she had another name on her birth certificate--and with help from a DNA genealogist finds her birth sister--but we never learn who the Black woman was who "just showed up one day with a baby" (according to HER mother) or why this also African American grandmother didn't go to the police and report that her daughter walked into the house with a baby, or try to find who the birth mother was. Somehow this mess gets blamed on white people and Society....? a failing of The System somehow? Tho we never learn from the newly discovered birth sister what happened--was this baby stolen, given away? was the birth mother crazy or on drugs? did they even look for this baby or did the mother know full well she'd given it to someone else? Case Study 2: a woman (whose Issues the filmmakers don't bother to acknowledge or address--what drugs she is on, what drugs is her "fiance" is on, why was she kicked out of transitional housing where her 4 kids were safe and moved into the lowest of low family homeless shelter) allowed for months a janitor (also African America) to pay the mother sums of money in order to access her 7-year-old daughter (who appears to be developmentally delayed), and who told the girl's school that the daughter was fine but her doctor wasn't allowing her to attend school due to migraines and then this mother forged a note pretending the pedo janitor was a physician, but still not bother looking for her daughter for 5 weeks--then somehow blaming "Society" for daughter's disappearance. Suing the DC government for allowing this guy to work at the shelter? Suing the school for somehow not getting to the bottom of this sooner? And, meanwhile, all stops were in fact pulled out by the media and police and FBI to find the little girl, but somehow this film sloppily tries to make the case that this into "just another example of where Black children and Black bodies are not cared about by white Society who considers them expendable." Whaaaat? There is a false dichotomy trotted out every 45 minutes about how ALL missing white women are cared versus NO missing Black men, women, or children are EVER cared about. Black and Missing never gets into the reality that often poor communities (of all races) are often extremely dysfunctional, day to day life is often messy, crime-ridden, with toxic or nonexistent family structures, drugs, fear of police, borderline behaviors and acting out by many people in those communities and lots of criminal and shady characters having access to the innocent and not screwed-up members of the community, how young people in this demographic (regardless of race) are particularly desperate and looking for a way out--and can be seduced and duped by predators on the internet and otherwise who promise them Things and Love. And how ALL of these factors comes into play when someone "goes missing." Black and Missing declares this a solely Black phenomenon AND states with no doubt that any failing to locate the missing men, women, and children ALL are due to WHITE police being racist and having contempt for Black people. The statistics cited throughout are sloppy, no citations, no documentation, carelessly thrown around, mixed up with opinions, mixed up with enraged judgement-clouded politicizing. This is a cynical--and a lame, poorly made--documentary that sidesteps coherence and reason in laying out an point of view---on an exceptionally important issue. The most effective and effecting parts of "Black and Missing" are the human stories about how heartbreaking it is for the family of cold cases of missing persons to stay active. See more Read all reviews

Black and Missing — Season 1

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