The Advent of “Feather Alerts” is a Great Time to Reflect on How Racist Antiracism Has Gotten

The line between left-wing and right-wing racism gets blurrier still

Built from an image by DALL-E 2 with the prompt “a cartoon of many people walking in a city looking at their phones and every phone has a different colored screen.”

California got roasted on social media this week as news of their new “Ebony Alert” system circulated. You see: Ebony Alerts are Amber Alerts, but for Black kids. If you’re thinking “weren’t Black kids covered by Amber Alerts?” the answer is “yes, obviously”. And it gets dumber: California also has a system for finding missing indigenous people called “Feather Alerts”. Please note: “Feather Alert” is California’s terminology, not mine; I would be banished to Antarctica if I proposed that any system for indigenous people be called "Feather Alert”. So, now that “antiracist” thinking has caused California to embrace separate but equal institutions with racist-depending-on-who-says-it names, it seems like a good time to examine how fundamentally racist so-called antiracism has become.

First, the facts: California has Ebony Alerts and Feather Alerts. These are modeled on the Amber Alert system, which, of course, is the thing that makes everyone’s phone explode at the same time during a meeting. Everyone then wonders for a moment if a nuclear strike is incoming, but once they check their phone, they realize that it’s an Amber Alert and they should dole out brutal vigilante justice to anyone in a white Toyota Camry.

Amber Alerts are for people under 18. People 65 and over have “Silver Alerts”, so-called because “silver” is the polite word we use to make grey hair seem like an achievement that old people have unlocked. California also has “Yellow Alerts” — stay calm — which are for hit-and-run suspects…why, who did you think they would be for? There are also Blue Alerts for attacks on law enforcement officers, and you can see where this is going: Activists have decided that there needs to be a thing for every color. California can never let anything be; every good idea must be extrapolated past the point of insanity by California’s Nonprofit Industrial Complex, which is basically a jobs program for the dimwit children of millionaires.

The genesis for Ebony Alerts seems to be a nonprofit organization called the Black and Missing Foundation. A report by that group is cited extensively in the press release from the state senator who introduced the Ebony Alert bill and also in local press coverage about the bill’s passage. Except the “report” isn’t a report: It’s a web page. That web page contains 420 words, and most of them are deeply stupid.

Here is the web page’s headline graphic — this is the very first thing you see:

Consider that quote: “Nearly 40 percent of missing persons are persons of color, yet African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the population.” But not every person of color is African-American. The Black and Missing Foundation — whose mission statement is to “[provide] an equal opportunity for all missing persons” — has completely erased Asian and Native American people. They also maybe erased Latino people, though that depends on how they (and the FBI database that’s the source of their statistics) handle the whole White Hispanic/Nonwhite Hispanic question. Because, you see, while categories like “white” and “Black” are races, “Hispanic” is an ethnicity, which refers to the culture of people in a geographic region. Though, Hispanic people can come from anywhere, and they don’t share one culture. And, if you think about it, according to that definition a person would stop being Hispanic once they live somewhere else for a while, and… …uh … …look: This is all 19th century horseshit and frankly we shouldn’t be talking this way, full stop.

The Black and Missing Foundation talks exclusively about reports of missing persons, but has nothing to say about how those reports are handled. If any evidence exists that law enforcement is lax in finding Black missing persons, or that society as a whole is less successful at finding Black missing persons, the BMF does not convey that information.

The BMF actually doesn’t talk about law enforcement at all, which is notable because their mini-report led to a change in how law enforcement is conducted. BMF’s complaints are with the media, which they say undercovers nonwhite missing persons. Here are 125 of the 420 words on the BMF’s web page:

None of these claims are substantiated. There are no analyses, no links, not even a horseshit “study” from a PhD student at Clinging To Our Accreditation By Our Fingernails University. Personally, I’d guess that white missing persons probably do get more media attention; I remember Nancy Grace getting such huge ratings talking about missing blonde ladies that I started to wonder if she was kidnapping the women herself. But the extent to which I believe something depends on the quality of the evidence, and the BMF offers no evidence for their core claim at all. This “report” is just some rando saying shit on the internet with no evidence, and it should bother us that that can serve as the basis for a law.

State Senator Steven Bradford echoed the BMF in his statement explaining why he proposed the Ebony Alert law. He also repeated the BMF’s unsubstantiated assertion (above, in orange) that Black children are disproportionately classified as “runaways”. He also failed to provide any evidence of his own that that claim is true. Importantly, the Ebony Alert system does not — as far as I can tell — do anything to address this assumed problem. Ebony Alerts create no new requirements for proper classification of persons, and the language closely follows the language for Amber Alerts. When asked how the system would work, Bradford replied: “Same way as it happens now with the Amber Alert.” Bradford asserted without evidence that Black children are being misclassified and then put forward a bill that does nothing about that alleged problem.

California also has Feather Alerts, and I’d like to reiterate that California is calling them “Feather Alerts”, not me. Feather Alerts are like Amber Alerts (and, for that matter, Ebony Alerts); the only substantial differences are: 1) They only apply to indigenous people; and 2) They apply to people of all ages. As for the name “Feather Alert”, that seems to have come from the bill’s author, State Assemblyman James C. Ramos. Ramos — thank Christ — is actually Native American. So, even though “Feather Alert” sounds like a joke proposal from a douchey staffer moments before being galactically cancelled, it appears to have come from an actual member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe. Which is probably why no one had the balls to say “Doesn’t ‘Feather Alert’ sound like a John Wayne movie from 1935 that everyone currently working for MGM is legally prohibited from mentioning?”

Here’s what’s going on: People have the (possibly true) belief that the media give less attention to missing persons of color. So, they have altered the California Highway Patrol alert system, which — it should be noted — affects law enforcement, not media. The implicit assumption undergirding this change is that Black and indigenous missing persons need a special system because society cares less about those people. But if that’s true, then creating special alerts based on race seems like the absolute last thing we should do! California has created a system that makes it easy for racists to turn off or ignore alerts for races they don’t care about! Somewhere, a Klansman responded to news California’s of Ebony Alert system with a hearty “Huzzah!”

Imagine, though, that Ebony Alerts and Feather Alerts prove to be highly effective. Suppose that something about those systems causes them to outperform Amber Alerts. In that case, shouldn’t Asian people get their own system? Of course they should. And so should white people, Hispanic people, and anyone else; in fact, you’d have a slam dunk equal protection case if California told anybody “no”. So, everyone gets access to the system, and at that point — wait for it — California has created the exact same fucking system that they started with! Except that they’ve actually created the same system but worse, because people will turn off alerts rather than get racially-bespoke notifications about the 175 people who go missing in California every day.¹

The Ebony Alert bill and the Feather Alert bill both passed unanimously. So, we have a museum-ready display of the idiocy of antiracist lawmaking. The process here was:

1. Observe a statistical disparity;

2. Perform no analysis whatsoever of why that disparity exists;

3. Craft a response to that disparity that’s ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst;

4. Watch that response get implemented because everyone decides it’s easier to simply co-sign the idiocy than to say “wait a minute” and maybe be portrayed as David Duke’s more-evil twin.

I continue to find race-based thinking intellectually bankrupt. Racial groups are nonsense, and worldviews that center the importance of those groups inevitably devolve into nonsense as well. Here, lawmakers have used nonexistent data and muddled thinking to create a separate-but-equal system that’s only legal if it doesn’t work. The racist-if-a-white-person-came-up-with-it-name is just the cherry on top of the racist sundae. Left-wing racism suffers from the same flaws as right-wing racism and increasingly produces similar results.

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1. How I got this number: The FBI says that 546,568 people went missing in 2022. California is 11.7 percent of the US population. 546,568 * .117 = 63948 / 365 = 175.