Should Amber Alerts go racial?

Politicians and Silicon Valley fuel divisions

1. More race dividing

“Gee, I’d look around for that missing kid if I only knew what color she was,” no sane person has ever said. Yet, California begs to differ.

Gavin Newsom, fresh from fulfilling his promise to only appoint a U.S. senator who was both black and female, has signed into law a separate race-based Amber Alert system —“Ebony Alert” — exclusively for missing black children and young women. 

Ebony Alert now joins another race-based alert system in California, “Feather Alert” for missing indigenous people. Proponents argue systemic racism, etc., etc., once again requires special treatment for their favorite oppressed class. No California politician summoned the courage to vote no or to advocate for finding every missing child, regardless of color. Racial politics still gets votes.

Today, technology enables easier, and perhaps illegal, discrimination — yet few seem to care.

Forget the Jim Crow signs; we've gone digital. 

• Google now lets businesses display themselves as black or women owned in search and map features.

• Uber Eats and DoorDash waived delivery fees for black-owned restaurants, with only Arizona daring to push back.

• Uber even has a feature to let its drivers reject male passengers, although female-chaperoned males are exempted, and, the company warns, “Some women riders may not express their gender or appear in a way that matches your perception of ‘femininity.’”

Yelp lets you find black-owned restaurants as well. Or, if you’re an honest-to-goodness White Supremacist, avoid them altogether. 

In fact, that raises a question about the new Ebony Alert. If racism is somehow responsible for an inequity in missing black kids, wouldn’t highlighting their race make that problem worse? If that’s the case, should we pretend the kids are actually white so that society might care more? 

Let's not kid ourselves. No black student is ticking the "white" box on their college applications. Like the job market, the racial calculus of college admissions is a well-known open secret. Everyone knows that being able to claim darker skin boosts your odds considerably. Except being Asian, of course, whose hard work gets them discriminated against the most.

These race-dividing programs are never called “racist,” but that’s precisely the right word. And, as always, for every person who gets helped because of skin color, another suffers harm.

Over the past years, America has regressed on race. Instead of moving toward a society where content of character trumps color of skin, we're backsliding into a new age of segregation, only this time with a Silicon Valley upgrade.

2. Insult a lesbian, go to jail

A court in Switzerland sentenced Alain Soral, a writer and commentator, to 60 days in jail for calling lesbian journalist Catherine Macherel, a “fat lesbian.” The leader of a lesbian activist group said the conviction, “is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society.” It’s unclear how calling a lesbian a lesbian is homophobic, but don’t do it in Switzerland.

3. The U.K. is turning against transgenderism

The U.K. has, as a general rule, traditionally been more socially liberal than the U.S. Brits are less likely to see the need for marriage before having kids (or after, for that matter). More than ever, Brits support cohabitation, single parents, abortion, and same-sex relationships. But they’re backtracking on transgenderism.

The prime minister said last week that no one should be "bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want." Meanwhile, a recent study showed that in 2019, 53% of the British people thought a trans person should be allowed to change the sex on their birth certificate. That fell to 30% in 2022. Also, in 2019, 82% of people considered themselves “not at all prejudiced” against transgender people. In 2022? That number was 64%.