The intersection of Figueroa and Slauson in South Los Angeles is an unremarkable one, a mundane swath fronting a gas station, an old train right of way, and a Harbor freeway overpass. Last fall’s revelation that serial rapist and murderer Chester Dwayne Turner stalked this corridor from 1987 to 1998 in pursuit of predominantly African American female victims has conferred this otherwise “unremarkable” part of South Los Angeles with a grisly cast. Turner’s background fits the banal profile of the misogynist sexual predator operating right under the nose of local law enforcement—a “cipher” who bounced in and out of menial jobs, unstable, irresponsible, abusive towards and financially dependent on the women in his life. Because he is a black male killer of black women it is safe to say that no movie will be made of his downward spiral, no Lifetime channel private eye melodrama on the last days of his victims trotted out in flashy citywide billboard campaigns.

When this story broke my initial sense of horror and loss quickly turned to rage; here again was brutal testimony to the invisibility of the lives of women of color in the mainstream media regime. Tabloid frenzy over the sagas of white female abduction victims has become the new national pastime. From supermarket check stand to idiot box the names of the victims are burned into our consciousness like retail brands. Be it in the hinterlands of Middle America (Laci Petersen, Elizabeth Smart) or the tony enclaves of the Beltway (Chandra Levy), the narrative, and accompanying imagery, is the same: these are the faces of American innocence, an innocence in desperate need of protection from the encroachments of predatory immorality. These narratives are never framed in terms of the pervasiveness of violence toward women. Nor of the unrelenting war against women and girls that masquerades as “deviant” male behavior, rather than as a symptom of the shrugging social acceptance of physical and sexual assault and domestic abuse as ineradicable parts of American life. Fetishized into objects of national hysteria, these narratives also proffer a powerful subtext—the not so oblique message that the lives that are most valued in the mainstream media’s lens on criminal justice are white and, often female. The serial rape and murder of working class black women; marginal, homeless, dubiously employed, has never elicited the Lacy Peterson brand of pathos or prurient interest from the dominant culture because of the slave era legacy of sexualizing black female bodies as the Other.

This practice has cast a long shadow. It is manifest in the images of hyper-sexual black femininity that circulates on videos, TV, and film. It is manifest in the high rates of sexual assault and harassment that exist in working class communities of color. And perhaps most tragic of all, it is manifest in the misogynistic cultural attitudes and behaviors that both young women and men of color exhibit toward black and Latino women in everyday life. While critiques of institutional racism have shaped the development of public policy to redress everything from housing discrimination to education, there remains a blatant absence of public policy that specifically addresses the intersection of racism and sexism vis-à-vis access to jobs, health care, and transportation. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, black women are not only the most well represented ethnic subgroup in the American female workforce but they are more likely than their white counterparts to be victims of sexual assault, and less able to afford health insurance.

We can draw a direct line between these outcomes and the literal and figurative killing fields of the media regime. Now that the South L.A. victims have been given names, faces, backgrounds, their killer identified through the efforts of a diligent LAPD detective, the families of Diane Johnson, Mildred Beasley, Paula Vance, and the nine other women who were murdered by one of L.A.’s “most prolific” serial killers might be able to mourn them properly. It will surely be cold comfort in a society that says that the lives of black women are expendable.