(CNN) -- Our country is obsessed with the perils of attractive young white women, as this week's trio of high profile crime stories about Amanda Knox, Jodi Arias and the Cleveland kidnapping victims demonstrates. We don't see breathless coverage of the disproportionately large number of African-American men tried for crimes in our system. We see almost no coverage of missing boys, or missing children of color, or crimes against nonwhites. This week an African-American man in Mississippi, Willie Manning, was about to be executed, though he was denied access to DNA testing. Manning, convicted of murdering two college students in 1994, maintains his innocence and requested the scientific testing, which has exonerated many convicted murderers, including some on death row.
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Lisa Bloom: Americans are obsessed with the perils of young, attractive white women
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She says titillating stories such as the Arias, Knox and Cleveland cases draw coverage
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She says a huge number of black men tried for crimes ignored, as are crimes against nonwhites
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Bloom: A nation of equals must focus on worthy cases regardless of race or gender
And the biggest @placeholder crime story of all receives the least mention: that we now incarcerate more of our own people than any other country on earth, or in human history, and that minority males are disproportionately policed, arrested and convicted, and sentenced to harsher sentences.