This past week in my Arts Studies class, we began to analyze the memoir Missing Sarah, a true story about the disappearance and murder of Downtown East Side sec worker Sarah De Vries at the hands of the infamous Robert Pickton. Missing Sarah was written by Maggie De Vries, Sarah’s sister and covers her life from beginning to end. I will use the novel in conjunction with an article read and a documentary to examine the “Whiteness” or Bias of Portrayal
Prior to starting Missing Sarah our professor had us read an article on “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” by Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young. As a result of reading the book and this article, I believe I made a connection. What stood out to me was that I believe what made Sarah’s case stand out was that she was adopted as an Aboriginal girl into a “white” family therefore she was indeed raised “white”. As a result of being raised in this way, she was not framed in the horrible media paradigm of being Aboriginal and a sex worker in the Downtown East Side (Jiwani and Young, 902). This analysis of what it meant to be Aboriginal in the Downtown East Side was again carried out in class prior to Missing Sarah. My idea on how it was different when the Aboriginal woman was raised “white” was substantiated by Jiwani and Young as they made mention on how media coverage on another murdered Aboriginal woman who was raised “white” was regarded as if she had lots of potential in comparison to the media’s coverage of simply murdered Aboriginal woman. Not surprisingly, the media portrayed the Aboriginal woman with words such as “addict”.
Connecting onto this theme, in my Sociology class, my professor decided to show us an MTV documentary called “White People”. Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas carried out a social experiment on the premise that minorities, tend to marginalize white people. What made me connect to Missing Sarah and the idea of bias white media was when he went to an Aboriginal school in the US. At the school, majority of the teachers were “white” so Vargas decided to carry out a class in conjunction with the staff asking what it is like being at school as an Aboriginal with a predominantly white staff body. The children replied and stated that their textbooks were quite bias as in everything explained in the books was from a “white” standpoint. There isn’t even acknowledgment of the fact that thousands of Aboriginal men and women were senselessly eliminated. What I notice here is that the lack of mention of Aboriginal people even in a textbook is that the bias must be internalized somehow or the simple fact there seems to be “white” curriculum being taught in schools. This begs the question, what makes them different? What makes any of us with colour or no colour different? Is it a byproduct of media portrayal or something more?
**I use quotation marks as I believe white, or color it does not matter, we are all human.
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Works Cited
De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss. 2008 ed. Toronto: Penguin, 2008. Print.