Recent media campaigns are shining a light on the 64,000 Black women and 1.5 million Black men that are missing in the United States.

Many critics have dismissed the efforts to finding these missing individuals by asserting that most black men are in jail, and/or dying at relatively young ages.

However, New York Times conducted a survey that stated for every 100 black women not in jail, there were only 83 black men. That also means for every 100 black women that 17 black men are missing.

In fact, so many black males have been incarcerated/died that black women outnumber black men by ratios of 6 to 10.

These numbers, according to New York Times, is barely existent amongst whites, where there is only one missing white man for every 100 white women.

An analysis conducted by ProPublica suggests that­­ murder also often claims these young men and women. Black men and women between ages 25-54 are victims of homicide than any other demographic. Young black men are eleven times more likely to die at the hands of police than their white counterparts.

Yet, these gaps will be swept under the rug as many other “Black Lives Matter” efforts have in the recent past.

The truth is, no one cares about missing black people. They’re societies one problem, so what harm does it to have a couple thousand of them incarcerated or dead? Some of them are taken care of and the world becomes a slightly better place.

And that happens to be the punchline: that black people are easily forgotten, neglected and perpetually hated to the brink where they should be erased.

The scariest part about this is that most of society is OK with it.

Nobody questions the black guy that got arrested or the other whom was killed. The media has made the loss of African Americans tolerable by portraying them as savage, uncouth hoodlums; subliminally persuading the masses that these people don’t deserve to see the light of the day.

Even though some individuals view Blacks as inhumane, when our men and women go missing, it effects our community. We have families, we have children, we’re husbands and wives. Are we not entitled to life and its wonderment as everyone else?

I digress – because although the numbers of my brothers and sisters that are missing is jarring, the only thing to be done is to remain diligent in our efforts to be successful, to prove to society that we’re more than a statistic or a stereotype, and to prove to that our skin color does not define who we are.

Otherwise, as our old friend Billie Holiday referenced, we are just “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…[and] fruit for the cows to pluck.”