Each year, too many women go missing with no hope of being located or found alive. This is especially true at a more disproportionate rate for Black women and young girls. In Apple TV+’s anthology series Truth Be Told, Gabrielle Union stars as a high school principle who is a fierce advocate in the charge to help find Black girls who have gone missing in her community.
Union spoke candidly with EBONY correspondent Yonathan Elias about the heavy impact that trauma and abuse has had on the Black community, and why little attention is brought to the many young Black girls who are lost each year.
“Media doesn’t care. We don’t control the media. We don’t control what they deem as important but their absence in our families and in our communities are felt immediately,” explained Union. “But some how, some folks have been conditioned to believe that Black and Brown folks don’t experience pain, trauma and abuse in the same way. It’s almost as if they think we are built for it.”
“They don’t prioritize our pain,” she continued. “In fact, they will make us complicit in our own abuse. I was raped at gun point in a store I worked by a stranger—they still ask me what I had on. They will make you complicit in your own abuse. It’s pure, straight-up racism is what it boils down to and the centering and prioritizing of white pain.”
