Eve Dunbar in Literary Hub:
In Washington, DC, the city currently home to America’s least popular president ever, the mainstream media “broke” the story that a rash of black girls had gone missing. Social networking platforms circulated hashtags and headlines speculating the girls had been abducted and forced into sex work. Others worried the girls were dead. The police countered all theories by assuring local and national worriers that these missing black girls were merely runaways.
Snatched. Murdered. Runaway. The truth of the matter is all of these titles attempt to name the reality that black girls are, and have been, disappeared in this nation, every day in all sorts of ways that never make headlines. Gwendolyn Brooks knew that black girls are among the most undervalued, exploited, and unprotected members of American society in 1968 when she published her long poem “In the Mecca,” which centers on the search for a black girl gone missing from her family’s South Side Chicago apartment building while her mother, Mrs. Sallie, is at work. Brooks gives the missing girl a name as diminutive as her place in society, Pepita. It’s a name we come to many stanzas into the poem, the moment her work-weary mother realizes the girl is gone and asks, “Where Pepita Be?” It’s a question that haunts the text and the reader.
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025 theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)
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