Let’s say you’re a 25-year-old adult male living in Compton, California, and you flip burgers for a living. Then one day, after a fight with your parents or your siblings, you decide you’ve had enough of the day-to-day. You get high and no-show at work. You go on a road trip with your friends to Las Vegas for a long weekend. It’s all very fun and irresponsible behavior, and as it happens, it’s not exactly unheard of in places like Compton.
Then let’s say your boss at the burger shop notices you didn’t show up for work. And he reports you missing. Following company protocol, he calls the police, and tells them that you’re AWOL. He says he has no idea why this is happening, or what’s going on.
How should law enforcement respond in that situation?
Starting next summer, in the biggest state in the country, the answer to that question will depend on one thing: your skin color. If you’re black, the cops will respond to your boss’ call by buzzing every cell phone in the state, telling millions of people to be on the lookout for you. State authorities will plaster your name and description all over billboards on the interstate. They’ll even put you on television, in the ticker at the bottom of all the college football games. That’s if you’re black, to be clear. If you happen to be white, on the other hand, well, it’s a different story. If you’re white, the authorities will do precisely none of that. Instead, they’ll hang up the phone and tell the burger guy he’s wasting their time.
If that sounds far-fetched, you should know that it’s not. It is, in fact, what’s coming very soon in the state of California. It’s the result of a new law that was just signed by California’s governor and future presidential candidate, Gavin Newsom. Under this law, if black people age 25 and under go missing for any reason, then law enforcement has the authority to issue something called — and I’m not making this name up — an “Ebony alert.” This is kind of like an Amber alert, but in several key respects, it’s very different. Watch:
There’s a lot going on here, starting with the fact that California already has something called “Feather alerts” for Indians. And now they’re adding “Ebony alerts” to the mix, because naturally, when you think of black people, you think of the word “ebony,” just like feathers come to mind when you’re talking about native Americans. I suppose there are more stereotypical and insulting names they could have come up with. But these are still pretty bad.
For the record, I had to double-check that news clip to make sure it wasn’t satire. But it’s real. They really have “Feather alerts” out west. People in California will be sleeping, or watching a football game, or drinking some zesty craft beer, and then they’ll get a “Feather alert” on their phones. And they’re expected to drop everything they’re doing and scramble to find some missing “indigenous person” once they see a Feather alert pop up. That’s a real thing that happens in California, at least since last year, when “Feather alerts” were implemented.
This, however, didn’t strike anyone in California as being completely and totally absurd. We can speculate as to why that might be. Maybe a lot of Berkeley grads honestly believe that white supremacist cowboys are still out there, tormenting the indigenous peoples at every turn. Whatever the case, they do indeed have “Feather alerts” in California, and they’re not joking about it. This is serious business.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Given that simple, if incredible fact, you have to wonder why California authorities haven’t deployed a whole assortment of other stereotypical alerts for every conceivable ethnicity under the sun. They have an alert that’s tailor-made for Indians, but why stop there? The possibilities are endless. They could have a “General Tso’s alert” for missing Asians, for example. They could implement a “Sombrero alert” for Hispanics, or a “Leprechaun alert” for missing Irish Americans. Of course the Left doesn’t care about two of those three groups, so this probably wouldn’t happen. But given that they’re now embracing every stereotype imaginable, in their quest to be “anti-racist,” it’s not hard to picture something like this down the line.
On second thought, by the way, I think “Kung Pao” alert has a better ring to it. And if they don’t implement this for missing Asian people, then at least this would be a good system to put in place for when the Uber Eats driver doesn’t show up with your Chinese food order.
At the same time, if you paid close attention to that news clip, you probably have more pressing concerns. For example, you might wonder why black people need a separate system of emergency alerts at all. For one thing, Amber alerts don’t do much, no matter what your skin color might be. As a recent USA Today analysis found, “Amber Alerts are extremely rare and, even when they are used, it’s unclear how much they help bring children home safely.”
On top of that, the data we have suggests that the Amber alert system isn’t discriminating against anyone. According to that same analysis, “From 2017 through the end of 2021, Black children made up 37% of missing-child reports and nearly 37% of Amber Alerts … indicating the alerts are issued proportionately.”
So what’s the problem exactly? What conceivable reason could there be to implement yet another iteration of a useless system that clearly isn’t discriminatory in any way? Here’s an NAACP flack and California state Senator Steven Bradford to explain:
First of all, note how they frame this. They say these Ebony alerts are for “Black youth and young black women.” But these new Ebony alerts in California, by law, will also sound for 25-year-old black males. Let’s just be clear about that.
Moving on — what they’re saying is that a lot of black people who vanish aren’t being counted as “missing persons” and therefore aren’t eligible for Amber alerts. And they’re saying that’s racist. To understand their argument, you need to know that, in order for authorities to issue an Amber Alert, by law, authorities need some evidence that a child was abducted, or disappeared for some reason against their will. If there’s no evidence of that, then that child is not classified as “missing.” They’re classified, instead, as “runaways.”
What the proponents of Ebony alerts are saying is that the police are deliberately misclassifying black people as “runaways” just to cook the missing persons data, because of course, the police are racist. In fact, that’s exactly what California legislators state in the text of their legislation on Ebony alerts. We don’t have to guess about this. Here’s what California lawmakers put in the bill:
Being identified as a runaway can also be a legal loophole for law enforcement, because when a child is listed as a runaway, the police are allowed to delay response and investigation time. In cases where the child is mislabeled as a runaway, this delay is crucial time that could be spent locating a child in danger.
So, they’re just coming out and saying that the police are lying about the large number of black runaways. The cops are taking advantage of a “loophole” in the law, so that black youth can be abducted without any investigation. That’s the claim, which is spelled out in legislation from the California State Assembly. They can’t think of another conceivable explanation for why a lot of black people might be unaccounted for. Their theory is that all these young black people are being abducted, and all the racist cops have decided to conspire to hide that fact. They know that all these missing black people definitely can’t have anything to do with the fact that 70% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. They also know it can’t possibly be related to the fact that more than 64% of black children grow up in single-parent homes. None of that is relevant, in their view.
Instead, California’s legislature is convinced that the problem is racist cops, who have apparently decided, in unison, not to investigate missing persons cases involving black people. And the California government’s solution to that invented problem is to implement the same solution that South Africa implemented long ago, which is race-based policing, where people with preferred skin colors are entitled to a police response, while people of disfavored skin colors are ignored. They’re codifying this into law.
Here’s the key part of this new Ebony alert legislation in California:
A law enforcement agency may request that an Ebony Alert be activated if that agency determines that an Ebony Alert would be an effective tool in the investigation of missing Black youth, including a young woman or girl.
That’s it. That’s all that’s necessary. There’s no requirement that authorities suspect an abduction, or some kind of kidnapping. That’s the standard for issuing a statewide alert for non-black people when they go missing, under the Amber alert system. The text of this new legislation in California admits that. Here’s what it says:
The Amber Alert system must fulfill strict criteria for the message to be broadcast. If these criteria are not met, an AMBER Alert cannot be issued, and the child is labeled as a runaway.
But the Ebony alert system does not have to obey any such restrictions. It’s enough, according to this new legislation, for authorities to determine that an Ebony alert would be an “effective tool” for finding a young black person who’s missing. There are no other standards outlined in the law. There’s just a bunch of suggestions. The bill goes on to state, for example, that if a black youth disappears under “unexplained” circumstances, then that could be sufficient to trigger the statewide alert. By contrast, non-black victims essentially have to show they’ve been kidnapped.
Let’s take stock of what’s happening here. The state of California is taking a system that doesn’t appear to work, which is the Amber alert system, and they ‘re duplicating it — only this time, they’re baking in a policy of explicit racial segregation. It’s not even clear how this will work, by the way. Let’s say a 17-year-old black teenager goes missing. Does that teenager get an Amber alert, in addition to an Ebony alert? And for that matter, what happens if an elderly native American disappears? Do they get a Feather alert, along with a Silver alert? Is there some way to combine all these categories, and have an Ebony Silver Feather alert? All it would take is a black guy who identifies as a native American, and we can do it. We can achieve the singularity. The possibilities are truly endless.
Or maybe, in that scenario, the 17-year-old black teenager wouldn’t get an Amber alert. Maybe he’d just get an Ebony alert. In that case, California will have established a truly segregated emergency alert system, with a separate alert for whites and blacks. At that point they might as well go all the way, and change “Amber alert” to “Ivory alert.”
Of course, either scenario is insane and counterproductive. It defies logic, really. Think about it. If you’re really worried about racist cops and MAGA Republicans who supposedly aren’t trying to find missing black people, why would your solution be to categorize all future missing persons alerts by race? Now the racist cops and MAGA Republicans can simply ignore the alerts for whatever race they don’t like. You’re making it easier for them.
Again, we can mock this all day. But all of these contradictions and inconsistencies aren’t simply the inevitable result of top-down, state-driven social engineering. They’re also the inevitable result of the worldview of California politicians, and liberals more generally, who refuse to recognize reality even when it hits them in the face. The truth is that a lot of young black people do run away from their homes. They do it voluntarily. And the reason they do it is that, when they were young, their fathers may have run away from them. That is a tragedy that repeats itself, generation after generation. It’s one of the reasons every urban center in this country is getting more dangerous every year.
But predictably, instead of doing something about that problem — instead of addressing the crisis of single-parent homes in the state of California — Democrats have once again decided to blame their political opponents. They’re saying the cops are responsible. They’re claiming MAGA Republicans are behind it. That’s the explanation they’ve settled on.
As a result, a lot of Californians are about to wake up at 3:00 am to random, blaring alerts on their cell phones, along with all the earthquake notifications and the push alerts about newly deposited poop on the sidewalk. Of course, many Californians will decide to opt out of these alerts indefinitely, because they’re too constant and too annoying. A lot of police resources will be wasted pursuing “runaways” who left home voluntarily. And in the end, black people will continue to disappear.
Unless something extraordinary occurs, this cycle will continue — unburdened, as Kamala Harris might say, by what has been. For California liberals like Gavin Newsom, that’s good enough. For everyone else — and especially for every non-Ebony person who goes missing in the state of California — this sends a very clear message. It is an explicit betrayal of the race-neutral system of laws that this country has upheld for generations.
This new law in California needs to be struck down, as quickly as possible. It must be condemned by every Republican politician and conservative power center in this country. If that doesn’t happen — if your race can somehow dictate how you’re treated by the police — then nothing else matters, really. All of the debates about Ukraine and the debt ceiling and the speaker of the House pale in comparison. When they come for you, whatever the charge may be, you will be judged on the basis of characteristics you cannot control. If you’re not “indigenous” or a “person of color,” then no cell phone alert will sound when you disappear. There will be no signs on the highway telling motorists to be on the lookout for someone matching your description. You will be isolated and demonized and condemned. You will be classified as a “runaway” and forgotten immediately. That’s a depressing realization, in some respects. It may seem demoralizing. But in reality, it’s clarifying. It tells you something important.
It communicates, loud and clear, the intent of the people who hate you more than anything else in the world. It tells you that everything they pretend is an injustice is, in reality, a punishment that they desperately want to inflict on you.