(August 4) Racial obsessions clearly have reached absurdly feverish levels when some people say even the search for missing persons should be segregated.
Not content with the hugely successful Amber Alert systems in place nationwide to find children suspected of having been abducted, activists in California, with its proposed Senate Bill 673, and even Alabama now want separate “Ebony Alert” systems just for young black people who have disappeared.
From when the first Amber Alerts were created in 1996 — there are now 82 of them — through Jan. 2 of this year, the programs had helped recover 1,127 children nationwide, and related wireless emergency alerts helped rescue 131 more.
Still, critics say a disproportionately high number of missing young people are black and that strict criteria for Amber Alerts lead to black youths being labeled as runaways rather than abducted and thus not helped by the system.
This may be true, but it’s irrelevant. The Amber Alert system itself has no obviously racial components, and a separate Child Abduction Response Team system, with 132 active CART teams across the nation, already helps search for missing people outside of the Amber Alert criteria. The most obvious ways to address the disparate numbers of missing black people are to tweak the Amber Alert criteria and to publicize the CART system better.
Still, those obsessed with race insist that only an Ebony Alert system will suffice.
In Alabama, Democratic state Rep. Juandalynn Givan said in late July that she worries her Ebony Alert bill will be hurt in the fallout from the recent, nationally covered case in which a 25-year-old named Carlee Russell falsely claimed to have been abducted.
The national outpouring of concern for Russell, though, showed that a separate Ebony Alert system is unnecessary. Precisely nobody was less worried about Russell because she was black than would have been the case if she were white. We all know that ebony and ivory live together on a piano keyboard as a single, unified whole. Why divide ebony from amber, then, when the point is that all missing children, regardless of skin color, should be returned safely to home? [The End]
(Published originally here, in exact same wording as above.)
