Post 6: Podcast Junkie / Black History Month

In honor of our first podcast week this week, and because Dr. Hanrahan mentioned my podcast recommendation in class, I actually had a Crime Junkie google search pulled up on my laptop screen at that time, Kristina witnessed it I had to write about podcasts, only partially to live up to my self-proclaimed title of avid-podcast-listener and #CrimeJunkie. So, to give a little bit of introductory information, this particular podcast uploads every Monday (sometimes with bonus episodes on certain special occasions) and I listen to it on my drive to class in the morning from home. With the episode of 2 Dope Queens fresh in my mind from the night before, this Monday’s episode piqued my interest in a familiar way. Because it is Black History Month, these hosts decided to focus on the disappearances of two black females from the D.C. area. Pretty close to home for us, less than two hours and 100 miles from Shepherdstown. And with Phoebe and Zoe deciding to focus on the problems faced specifically by black women in the episode I listened to, it was a sign that the Universe had taken pity and blessed me with this week’s Blog Post Idea.

Sidenote: I want to encourage all of you to listen to this episode, so I am not going to go too into the details of these cases here, but I want to talk about how, though these are very different podcasts with very different atmospheres, both are aimed towards the bettering of the world for black women, and it turns out that the two relate in a very ominous manner.

I talked a bit in class about the episode of 2 Dope Queens that I listened to, where Phoebe Robinson interviews Zoe Kravitz, but I’ll do a mini-review of the important stuff. Zoe Kravitz tells the story of being blocked from auditioning for a fairly big role in a Hollywood movie due to the fact that she has too much of an “urban” (6:04) look which means she is not the typical white lady that loads when you hit ‘Default’ on a video game character creator and calls out for more roles where the woman can be a real person, rather than just an accessory to the Man’s story (13:00). At the hands of the “rich, white, powerful people” (16:43) that rule society, the plight of the minorities See: women and POC grows exponentially and infinitely. In this episode, “Phoebe and Zoe Kravitz Are Witchy AF”, the anecdotes that both Phoebe and Zoe tell describe the current climate of sexism and racism in America, the very same climate that causes the events described in this week’s episode of Crime Junkie to flourish.

This is eight-year-old Relisha Rudd.

She lived with her mother and siblings in a homeless shelter in D.C. and had a record of not-so-great attendance. This instance, after around 3 weeks of absences in 2014, Relisha’s school finally tried to contact her family. Turns out, not only had the school waited a strangely long amount of time before attempting to contact her family, her mother and grandmother, the two most trusted guardians in the young girl’s life, had not seen her in 18 days. Let me say that again, Eighteen Days. She had not been reported missing. She had not even been looked for.

This is Andrea Tatum alongside her husband (and murderer) Khalil. No more on them because #NoSpoilers.

This is Unique Harris, pictured on the bottom with her two sons.

                

Unique was 24 years old at the time of her disappearance from the D.C. area in 2010, she was a single mother raising two boys in her own apartment, which was only a few minutes down the road from her mother's home, and she is black. Unique disappeared from her apartment in the middle of the night with not only her two sons in the home, but another child that was having a sleepover with them, as well. She was, as the saying goes, blind as a bat, and wore her glasses every waking moment. Literally. When her home was inspected, her glasses were folded neatly and sitting atop the unoccupied pillow on her bed.

Without giving too much away, I will conclude by saying that the topics discussed in the 2018 episode of 2 Dope Queens with Zoe Kravitz, which were overall issues of sexism and racism, lead directly to the tragedies of Unique Harris and Relisha Rudd. Relisha was eight years old and nobody started looking for her until her legal guardian(s) had not seen her for eighteen days and she had missed almost three weeks of school. Unique Harris vanished right out of her own apartment while over the watch of her two sons and another child, though some of her belongings were missing, she left her most important possession behind on her pillow, as if she were just there in bed asleep. These cases would have been much more actively publicized and taken with much more seriousness if these two girls were white, rather than black.

           Either way, I would recommend listening to this episode as it relates so directly to what we have been discussing in this class thus far, and I personally love the way Brit and Ashley tell these stories.

P.S. Decided to try out the strikethrough tool this time, thanks to Holly. I hope I did it justice…

MISSING: Relisha Rudd // Unique Harris