when you see in the subject lines “missing black toddler” it is a slapping sobering reminder that America disregards the people who helped built this country what it is till this day. According to Black America Web, Two-year-old Jada Justice of Portage, Indiana has been missing now for a week. But you wouldn’t know it from watching national television news shows.

The child, a black toddler, was last seen last Tuesday when her cousin said she left the child alone in a car at a Gary, Indiana, convenience store while she went inside.

Justice is now listed on the Web site for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and on the “America’s Most Wanted” Web site. Television stations, radio stations and newspapers around Gary and Chicago have followed the story and shown photos of Justice with numbers to call to alert authorities if she is spotted.

But unlike the recent cases of Kaylee Anthony of Orange County, Florida and Haleigh Cummings of Satsuma, Florida, the search for Jada has not received the same kind of national attention.

“Unfortunately, in cases like this, it’s not until someone writes about the fact that there is no national attention that they start doing stories,” said Eric Deggans, media and television critic at the St. Petersburg Times.

Gary, Indiana is technically part of the Chicago media market, which is actually larger than the markets where others have lived whose cases of either abduction or exploitation were featured prominently on national television, Deggans said. Major networks often pick up stories from their affiliates in those markets and develop national stories.

“If there were reporters who cared about this, they could be all over it,” Deggans told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

In my honest opinion, I believe we need to stop looking for mainstream media to assist us anything to help us. To much history in this country has shown that they don’t have our best interest at heart. The proof of us making up the majority of the jail population in this country, police brutality, racism, poverty amongst African Americans, when do we say enough is enough and we take things in to our own hands?

Basically what I’m saying is, we come together and work with TV one, BET or any other bigger black owned media outlets to get our stories out. Our off duty black policeman contributes to the communities they live in by forming an organization or some kind of task force that is dedicated to cases like these above. It’s time that we start doing things independent of this system and start doing for ourselves.