Missing Black Undergraduate Women and the Politics of Disposability: A Critical Race Feminist Perspective

According to the Black and Missing Foundation roughly 64,000 Black women are missing. However, little is known about these women due to the racialized and gendered narratives that collectively shroud their lives of and contribute to their disposability. Black women who go missing receive limited, negative, or no attention at all. Capturing attention requires their lives to be proven worthy, which is difficult when Black women narratives are linked to crime, mental illness and other issues to suggest they were some how responsible or deserving of their predicament. In this article we use a critical race feminist (CRF) framework and introduce a CRF methodology to center the stories of missing Black undergraduate women, disrupt the invisibility and disposability that ensures silence around their lives and highlight the need for more scholarly efforts that focus on Black women.