Come on Jeff! Next thing you'll be telling us is that the whole paper straw thing was initiated by a 9-year old's presentation on plastic straws in the ocean that had zero scientific foundation and assumed that every person the US on average used one and a half plastic straws per day. Oh, wait: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-ban-fact-check-nyt.html Well, either way, I'm sure that plastic straws are a significant contributor to plastic pollution in the ocean, making it worth everyone yelling and screaming that we are monsters if we don't switch to paper straws that don't really work. Oh, wait: it's only 0.025%
One assumes a zebra alert, given that Reggie White (former DE for the GB Packers, look up his speech to the Wisconsin legislature) seems to have created these?
That's what racist George Jefferson used to call Jenny Willis on The Jeffersons! Vintage black racism, Seattle Guy!!! Hope you're not too young to know what that is :)
There are some non-racial differences between Ebony and Amber alerts, mostly that Ebony alerts can be issued in more situations(as shown in your links). Ebony alerts can be issued for people up to age 25, while the Amber cutoff is 18. Ebony alerts, but not Amber alerts, can be issued for children (that meet the racial requirement) when abduction isn't the leading theory for why they're missing or if they're not considered to be in "imminent danger".
The main idea isn't that the general public ignores Amber alerts for non-white people, it's that law enforcement is less likely to issue them. For example, the police might think a white girl is in "imminent danger" while a Black girl in an identical situation is only at risk for being trafficked. Therefore a new alert with lower criteria will make everyone equally likely to receive an alert. It assumes that the disparity in how missing children are classified is due to law enforcement bias so targets that.
It's still a dumb trend though. And unfortunately it's going to be self-perpetuating. Ebony alerts, which could be issued when a 24 year doesn't come home, are going to have much worse clearance rate than Amber alerts, so politicians will be required to "do something" to address them. The times when Ebony alerts are successful will be taken as proof of their effectiveness, even if they didn't contribute to the case being resolved. Ebony alerts, which can be issued in less serious situations, are also going to be taken less seriously than Amber alerts, leading to other problems.
Yes, Ebony Alerts lower the bar in the two ways you mention (up to age 25 and no imminent danger requirement). But if these tweaks make it more likely that young people will be found, would the police really deny that system to a person who isn't Black? If "no", the racial requirement is pointless. If "yes", it violates the equal protection clause.
The argument is that police would classify a white child in imminent danger when they would classify an identical Black child as a runaway. Therefore, Black runaways should be treated similarly to white children in imminent danger. Similarly, the age requirement is expanded so a missing Black 22 year old gets the same attention as white Gabby Petito. The different requirements is not meant to be a different system, but act as a corrective for systemic discrimination that prevents the current system from being expanded to everyone.
To use a convoluted comparison, imagine a discriminatory bank that deducts 200 points from the credit score of anyone that lives in a majority Black neighborhood. An anti-racist mortgage broker that usually only accepts applicants with a 600 score could therefore accept Black applicants with a 400 score. "Lowering the bar" would correct for the earlier discrimination.
Anyways, it's based off the unsubstantiated claim that Black children are more likely to be classified as runaways. I haven't found the ultimate source of that statistic, but BMF links to an entry in a college freshman writing assignment that cites an academic paper written by someone at William and Mary law school who is now at the Brookings institution (link below). That paper seems to get the stat from an article at The Root which is no longer online. BMF made an HBO doc with an episode focused on the runaway classification, so maybe they source the stat there.
Assuming that that stat is true, then that means that either Black children are more likely to be runaways or that racist law enforcement is more likely to classify them as runaways than white children. When an anti-racist sees racial disparity, they see racism (to paraphrase Abram X. Kendi) so they go for the second explanation.
Anyways, I don't really agree with the new alerts, but see the internal logic. I'd prefer research into whether there is actual discrimination and addressing it directly. Or if Black children run away more often, then find out why (maybe it's disproportionate involvement in the foster care system due to parental involvement in the legal system). With California's system, we'll just develop a rainbow of alerts (including a rainbow alert for missing LGBT youth) with a variety of different criteria calibrated to correct for perceived discrimination. But I also probably couldn't be elected to a state senate or any position where I'd make that decision (I was recently rejected by Aldi so my career prospects are not good).
This is a good discussion. And through this discussion, I think we've found the source of the claim that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways: It is a totally unsubstantiated claim from a blog called "The Root".
The William & Mary paper does say "AMBER Alert laws are typically used in missing persons cases disproportionately because missing Black children are more likely to
While I don't want to open a discussion of the quality of The Root as a news source, I will say: 1) It seems pretty radical, and 2) Radical or not, what's important is the quality of the evidence supporting the claim. And The Root offers no evidence whatsoever that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways. Here are the relevant sentences (which constitute just about everything that The Root has to say about runaways):
"But what’s still abundantly clear is that young black girls are missing, and many don’t care. The lack of rage over these young girls reveals a troubling truth: Missing girls are oftentimes immediately thought of as “runaways” who are not being harmed by systems of exploitation and victimization."
There are no links in those sentences, no footnotes. As with BMF: The truth is simply asserted and not backed up by any evidence whatsoever.
So, I think we've traced the path of this wholly unsubstantiated claim: Some random blog > academic paper > NGO > State Senator. IMHO, this is really bad stuff.
Still: Despite the complete lack of evidence, maybe it IS true that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways. If so, it seems to me that a good remedy would be to take measures to make sure girls are properly categorized (e.g. training, audits, perhaps rewriting guidelines to make them more clear). Creating a separate system seems like a bad remedy because -- as you point out -- creating multiple alert systems causes new problems.
Oops, I messed up the link from the William & Mary paper and thought the root article was deleted. To be honest, once I saw it was The Root, I figured it was a dead end. A Root reader is expected to be reading every Root article and every tweet from everyone ever mentioned in the blog. Expecting to see the original data in a random Root article is like expecting Guardians of the Galaxy 4 to explain why Iron Man has a glowing heart - you can assume that it's explained elsewhere but you'll need to sift through the expanded universe to find it.
Ultimately, I think that everyone involved doesn't think to justify it because they're involved in a different debate (which loomed large in the Rootverse in 2017) of why Black teenagers are more likely to be considered runaways. This was prompted by 14 Black girls going missing in a single day in Washington D.C., many of whom were classified as runaways. The mayor's office defended that classification and said it'd work on avoiding the conditions that led to teenagers running away. Activists disagreed and insisted that the discrepancy was due to biased classification rather than different underlying conditions causing different outcomes. Both sides of the debate accepted the discrepancy with classification so you could also cite the DC Mayor's office as a source (for missing people in the DC area at least).
This debate - about whether disproportionate metrics between races are due to biased classifiers or different underlying conditions - is the crux of a lot of inter-left infighting. The prime example is education where some progressives want to directly influence acceptance rates (with brute force methods such as accepting POC students with lower test scores) while others want to address what led to those lower test scores. You(based on your writing about affirmative action), me and the DC's mayor office seem to firmly fall into the second camp and that's probably your actual dispute with BMC and the state senator.
That's why their actions seem so nonsensical (as described by your hypothetical 4 steps to antiracist lawmaking). They don't think it's necessary to investigate the cause of a statistical disparity in how a biased group classifies people of different races. For them, the null hypothesis is discrimination so the onus is on someone proving otherwise. Which makes sense in some cases - if you heard that a lot of Black Arkansans failed tests for voting in 1900, would you start looking at literacy rates or just assume that the testers were biased?
Anyways, this was a pretty long tangent and I think I'm guilty of the worst type of internet comment - complaining that people didn't write a different article.
Example of disagreement between DC mayor's office and Root activists:
"Yellow alert" fooled me for a second. That was mean.
American antiracism must be the most incomprehensible feature of American culture to my European mind, just behind Trump's polling numbers. It does sound racist to say "colored people", but then it turns out "people of color" is used abundantly by the antiracist left. These two phrases would get identical translations in my own language, I can only remember which is which because progressives use acronyms like BIPOCS.
That, at least, is relatively straightforward: it's a matter of where exactly we are in the arms race between racists applying negative affect to neutral descriptors to get new derogatory terms and efforts by minorities to reclaim old derogatory descriptors. Combine that with English allowing for words to be freely converted from adjective to noun and back, you get two near-identical terms from about a century ago that can start to drift apart. And the antiracist community has imported the love of "person first" language that I think has origins in the parents-of-autistic-children community, which lets you predict which term gets reclaimed and which one lies fallow (outside of acronyms that are never expanded, a la the NAACP).
Several Colorado-based “independent media outlets” have chosen to no longer use the term “migrant” because they believe it’s dehumanizing. Instead they will (kid you not) use “new immigrant”
Now that's a weird one. I can see going back to "immigrant" on the grounds that the bare descriptor "migrant" (implying eg seasonal laborers or other residents without aspirations to permanence/citizenship) isn't really a good descriptor for people fleeing authoritarian regimes with imploding economies, but I do not get what the adjective "new" is doing there.
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.
It's not unusual for terms that mean the same thing to have different connotations. This is especially true in politics, which can rely on emotional language. Migrant/immigrant/expat/alien all mean roughly the same thing, right?
Although the POC term is a part of a trend of "Person centered language" that I personally find annoying. You see it in terms like "person experiencing homelessness" or "individual with developmental disabilities" . The basic idea is that this focuses on the person, rather than the homelessness or disability. I don't really get that, but there is a logical reason for why progressives (sorry, people with progressive politics) use POC
"Jew" is a neutral term when used as a noun, but mildly offensive when used as an adjective and extremely offensive when used as a verb. Or think about the difference between "The Ukraine" and "Ukraine". "Jap" is a slur for Japanese. Brit isn't a slur for British. As included in the comment you are replying to, "homeless person" is sometimes considered more offensive than "person experiencing homelessness" despite not using different words.
It is arbitrary that "colored people" is more offensive than "people of color" and those sorts of connotations can be difficult for people learning the language. However, it is not particularly confusing if you spend much time the country. A good rule of thumb is that progressives tend to use "person of/with ______"
Personally, I think that American English has simpler etiquette than many languages spoken in Europe. Portuguese has three different words for "you" depending on rank, with different connotations in different regions of Portugal and Brazil. I'd much rather take "POC" than deal with that.
"Yellow alert" fooled me for a second. That was mean."
Nah, you're just a racist ;) Why the hell do we even have BIPOC? Several snowflakes get to be grouped into BIPOC, which is redundant anyway? Black, Indigenous, and People of Color...because Black & Indigenous aren't? Isn't that RACIST? And why is it okay to say People Of Color but not Colored People?
I am old, probably much older than the average IMBW reader. I think the world is ending, which is OK with me because, hey I got mine. Seriously, I think the amount of stupid in the world is at a super-critical level and will result in a massive and nearly instantaneous release of a wave of mindless, dull. empty headedness which will sweep around the world. In the wake of the Super-Stupid tsunami will be the true zombie apocolypse, humans, frozen, unable to act, " am I a racist, am I an anti-racist, am I an unconcious racist, am I a concious racist, what is race, what is a racist........."
I find it hard to believe 1500 people go missing a day in the US. That's a staggering number and some of those people probably just went on an unplanned shopping trip.
The missing persons numbers in America typically include unsubstantiated reports. Many of these cases that involve children are in fact custody disputes, errors or, yes, runaways, which, while not inconsistent with claims of kidnapping, are rarely the image of the serial child abductors we imagine when it comes to things like Amber Alerts.
I realize that the problems with missing persons numbers, or the ever-elusive "trafficking" made up numbers, are not the target of this article, but in point of fact you cannot really meaningfully discuss this issue without wading into the dubious statistics and self-serving reports of the very bipartisan and ideologically diverse NGO complex (it includes plenty of evangelical activists; see also "The Sound of Freedom" and the crazed conspiracy theories involving widespread "elite" child trafficking).
California simply added an entirely new dimension of unnecessary moral panic.
This is probably true, but you must also recall the US is very large. The Texas of countries, one could call it - right down to the even larger rival that wins land area contests hands down but we don't talk about it because it's faraway and cold.
Don't worry though; I'm sure Dad will be back with the milk soon.
Very funny and welcome treat coming to me just after I listened to the Making Sense podcast wherein Sam Harris and Coleman Hughes discussed “Race and Reason”. I never would have guessed the Left would be responsible for pushing us down the slippery slope that leads to four more years of misery. Anyone know the requirements for immigration to New Zealand?
I would argue that within American culture, “white” and “black” are also ethnic groups, not races, albeit both groups using skin color and genetic background as ethnic markers
I think that's something that has been unfolding for a while even though people who should be familiar with the phenomenon of ethnogenesis have been very slow to recognize it. There's nothing in principle that would prevent ethnic groups from forming along an arbitrary line like race. After all, the other indicia of ethnicity are all equally arbitrary. But there's a certain political and moral revulsion against recognizing that race and ethnicity are so intertwined in this country that they have in fact produced new ethnic groups, particularly because the vast majority of white and black people have no meaningful ties to their predecessor cultures.
“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”
This explains so-called “alternative transportation” organizations too. Consider for example the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition:
Speaking of racism, we add an unhealthy dollop of misandry in Canada. Indigenous and white ally virtue-signallers are always going on about 'missing and murdered Indigenous women' and ignoring the fact that the number of missing & murdered Indigenous men is often just a few corpses close to M&M Indigenous women. But we don't talk about *that* here....
What concerns me about the balkanization of these alerts is not desensitization so much as selective sensitization.
See, you write about Amber Alerts being the thing that makes people think the world is ending until they actually check their phones and see it's only that Toyotathon has claimed another victim, but that situation is avoidable; you can actually *opt out* of Amber Alerts while still receiving presidential ones. And if they make more types of alerts, that opens the possibility to opt-in to only those you care about - now for example a racist can say "I don't much care for those featherheads, but I'll subscribe to the Ebony Alerts because Black Lives Matter and others don't." Separate-but-equal proving itself unequal once again.
Thus we create another double-bind like the one you mention, where the only way this doesn't violate equal protection is if none of the alerts actually do anything useful, which would be a problem itself.
Come on Jeff! Next thing you'll be telling us is that the whole paper straw thing was initiated by a 9-year old's presentation on plastic straws in the ocean that had zero scientific foundation and assumed that every person the US on average used one and a half plastic straws per day. Oh, wait: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-ban-fact-check-nyt.html Well, either way, I'm sure that plastic straws are a significant contributor to plastic pollution in the ocean, making it worth everyone yelling and screaming that we are monsters if we don't switch to paper straws that don't really work. Oh, wait: it's only 0.025%
I gotta ask: what kind of alert gets sent out for a biracial kid?
One assumes a zebra alert, given that Reggie White (former DE for the GB Packers, look up his speech to the Wisconsin legislature) seems to have created these?
Wow, I just looked up that speech. That is...something.
I once having a conversation with a black gentlemen at a store once, and he brought up how hurtful it was for his daughter to be called a "Zebra".
So yeah, Zebra Alert strikes the right level of tone-deafness for these activists.
How about 'newspaper'? They're black and white ;) Or Dice, Dominoes, Panda, or Ore--er, never mind!
That's what racist George Jefferson used to call Jenny Willis on The Jeffersons! Vintage black racism, Seattle Guy!!! Hope you're not too young to know what that is :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UePtoxDhJSw
Depends on the races of the parents...
There are some non-racial differences between Ebony and Amber alerts, mostly that Ebony alerts can be issued in more situations(as shown in your links). Ebony alerts can be issued for people up to age 25, while the Amber cutoff is 18. Ebony alerts, but not Amber alerts, can be issued for children (that meet the racial requirement) when abduction isn't the leading theory for why they're missing or if they're not considered to be in "imminent danger".
The main idea isn't that the general public ignores Amber alerts for non-white people, it's that law enforcement is less likely to issue them. For example, the police might think a white girl is in "imminent danger" while a Black girl in an identical situation is only at risk for being trafficked. Therefore a new alert with lower criteria will make everyone equally likely to receive an alert. It assumes that the disparity in how missing children are classified is due to law enforcement bias so targets that.
It's still a dumb trend though. And unfortunately it's going to be self-perpetuating. Ebony alerts, which could be issued when a 24 year doesn't come home, are going to have much worse clearance rate than Amber alerts, so politicians will be required to "do something" to address them. The times when Ebony alerts are successful will be taken as proof of their effectiveness, even if they didn't contribute to the case being resolved. Ebony alerts, which can be issued in less serious situations, are also going to be taken less seriously than Amber alerts, leading to other problems.
Yes, Ebony Alerts lower the bar in the two ways you mention (up to age 25 and no imminent danger requirement). But if these tweaks make it more likely that young people will be found, would the police really deny that system to a person who isn't Black? If "no", the racial requirement is pointless. If "yes", it violates the equal protection clause.
The argument is that police would classify a white child in imminent danger when they would classify an identical Black child as a runaway. Therefore, Black runaways should be treated similarly to white children in imminent danger. Similarly, the age requirement is expanded so a missing Black 22 year old gets the same attention as white Gabby Petito. The different requirements is not meant to be a different system, but act as a corrective for systemic discrimination that prevents the current system from being expanded to everyone.
To use a convoluted comparison, imagine a discriminatory bank that deducts 200 points from the credit score of anyone that lives in a majority Black neighborhood. An anti-racist mortgage broker that usually only accepts applicants with a 600 score could therefore accept Black applicants with a 400 score. "Lowering the bar" would correct for the earlier discrimination.
Anyways, it's based off the unsubstantiated claim that Black children are more likely to be classified as runaways. I haven't found the ultimate source of that statistic, but BMF links to an entry in a college freshman writing assignment that cites an academic paper written by someone at William and Mary law school who is now at the Brookings institution (link below). That paper seems to get the stat from an article at The Root which is no longer online. BMF made an HBO doc with an episode focused on the runaway classification, so maybe they source the stat there.
Assuming that that stat is true, then that means that either Black children are more likely to be runaways or that racist law enforcement is more likely to classify them as runaways than white children. When an anti-racist sees racial disparity, they see racism (to paraphrase Abram X. Kendi) so they go for the second explanation.
Anyways, I don't really agree with the new alerts, but see the internal logic. I'd prefer research into whether there is actual discrimination and addressing it directly. Or if Black children run away more often, then find out why (maybe it's disproportionate involvement in the foster care system due to parental involvement in the legal system). With California's system, we'll just develop a rainbow of alerts (including a rainbow alert for missing LGBT youth) with a variety of different criteria calibrated to correct for perceived discrimination. But I also probably couldn't be elected to a state senate or any position where I'd make that decision (I was recently rejected by Aldi so my career prospects are not good).
academic paper: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1508&context=wmjowl
HBO doc: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15789286/?ref_=tt_eps_top
This is a good discussion. And through this discussion, I think we've found the source of the claim that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways: It is a totally unsubstantiated claim from a blog called "The Root".
The William & Mary paper does say "AMBER Alert laws are typically used in missing persons cases disproportionately because missing Black children are more likely to
be labeled as runaways." But that's not original research: That's footnoted. And the footnote goes to an article at "The Root", which describes itself as "Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude." Here's the article: https://www.theroot.com/the-danger-of-forcing-the-runaway-label-on-the-missin-1793799915
While I don't want to open a discussion of the quality of The Root as a news source, I will say: 1) It seems pretty radical, and 2) Radical or not, what's important is the quality of the evidence supporting the claim. And The Root offers no evidence whatsoever that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways. Here are the relevant sentences (which constitute just about everything that The Root has to say about runaways):
"But what’s still abundantly clear is that young black girls are missing, and many don’t care. The lack of rage over these young girls reveals a troubling truth: Missing girls are oftentimes immediately thought of as “runaways” who are not being harmed by systems of exploitation and victimization."
There are no links in those sentences, no footnotes. As with BMF: The truth is simply asserted and not backed up by any evidence whatsoever.
So, I think we've traced the path of this wholly unsubstantiated claim: Some random blog > academic paper > NGO > State Senator. IMHO, this is really bad stuff.
Still: Despite the complete lack of evidence, maybe it IS true that Black girls are more likely to be classified as runaways. If so, it seems to me that a good remedy would be to take measures to make sure girls are properly categorized (e.g. training, audits, perhaps rewriting guidelines to make them more clear). Creating a separate system seems like a bad remedy because -- as you point out -- creating multiple alert systems causes new problems.
Oops, I messed up the link from the William & Mary paper and thought the root article was deleted. To be honest, once I saw it was The Root, I figured it was a dead end. A Root reader is expected to be reading every Root article and every tweet from everyone ever mentioned in the blog. Expecting to see the original data in a random Root article is like expecting Guardians of the Galaxy 4 to explain why Iron Man has a glowing heart - you can assume that it's explained elsewhere but you'll need to sift through the expanded universe to find it.
Ultimately, I think that everyone involved doesn't think to justify it because they're involved in a different debate (which loomed large in the Rootverse in 2017) of why Black teenagers are more likely to be considered runaways. This was prompted by 14 Black girls going missing in a single day in Washington D.C., many of whom were classified as runaways. The mayor's office defended that classification and said it'd work on avoiding the conditions that led to teenagers running away. Activists disagreed and insisted that the discrepancy was due to biased classification rather than different underlying conditions causing different outcomes. Both sides of the debate accepted the discrepancy with classification so you could also cite the DC Mayor's office as a source (for missing people in the DC area at least).
This debate - about whether disproportionate metrics between races are due to biased classifiers or different underlying conditions - is the crux of a lot of inter-left infighting. The prime example is education where some progressives want to directly influence acceptance rates (with brute force methods such as accepting POC students with lower test scores) while others want to address what led to those lower test scores. You(based on your writing about affirmative action), me and the DC's mayor office seem to firmly fall into the second camp and that's probably your actual dispute with BMC and the state senator.
That's why their actions seem so nonsensical (as described by your hypothetical 4 steps to antiracist lawmaking). They don't think it's necessary to investigate the cause of a statistical disparity in how a biased group classifies people of different races. For them, the null hypothesis is discrimination so the onus is on someone proving otherwise. Which makes sense in some cases - if you heard that a lot of Black Arkansans failed tests for voting in 1900, would you start looking at literacy rates or just assume that the testers were biased?
Anyways, this was a pretty long tangent and I think I'm guilty of the worst type of internet comment - complaining that people didn't write a different article.
Example of disagreement between DC mayor's office and Root activists:
https://www.theroot.com/mayor-muriel-bowser-creates-task-force-on-missing-dc-te-1793651487
NPR saying that the social media campaign about the DC missing girls was based on a misunderstanding: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/27/521655564/d-c-s-missing-teens-a-false-number-that-spurred-a-real-conversation-on-race
"Yellow alert" fooled me for a second. That was mean.
American antiracism must be the most incomprehensible feature of American culture to my European mind, just behind Trump's polling numbers. It does sound racist to say "colored people", but then it turns out "people of color" is used abundantly by the antiracist left. These two phrases would get identical translations in my own language, I can only remember which is which because progressives use acronyms like BIPOCS.
That, at least, is relatively straightforward: it's a matter of where exactly we are in the arms race between racists applying negative affect to neutral descriptors to get new derogatory terms and efforts by minorities to reclaim old derogatory descriptors. Combine that with English allowing for words to be freely converted from adjective to noun and back, you get two near-identical terms from about a century ago that can start to drift apart. And the antiracist community has imported the love of "person first" language that I think has origins in the parents-of-autistic-children community, which lets you predict which term gets reclaimed and which one lies fallow (outside of acronyms that are never expanded, a la the NAACP).
The ol' Euphemism Treadmill is a helluva drug.
Several Colorado-based “independent media outlets” have chosen to no longer use the term “migrant” because they believe it’s dehumanizing. Instead they will (kid you not) use “new immigrant”
https://denverite.com/2024/02/06/immigrants-style-change/
Now that's a weird one. I can see going back to "immigrant" on the grounds that the bare descriptor "migrant" (implying eg seasonal laborers or other residents without aspirations to permanence/citizenship) isn't really a good descriptor for people fleeing authoritarian regimes with imploding economies, but I do not get what the adjective "new" is doing there.
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.
It's not unusual for terms that mean the same thing to have different connotations. This is especially true in politics, which can rely on emotional language. Migrant/immigrant/expat/alien all mean roughly the same thing, right?
Although the POC term is a part of a trend of "Person centered language" that I personally find annoying. You see it in terms like "person experiencing homelessness" or "individual with developmental disabilities" . The basic idea is that this focuses on the person, rather than the homelessness or disability. I don't really get that, but there is a logical reason for why progressives (sorry, people with progressive politics) use POC
That's the thing though: expat and alien are different words. It's as if 'an expat' was a slur and 'an expatriated person' was praise.
"Jew" is a neutral term when used as a noun, but mildly offensive when used as an adjective and extremely offensive when used as a verb. Or think about the difference between "The Ukraine" and "Ukraine". "Jap" is a slur for Japanese. Brit isn't a slur for British. As included in the comment you are replying to, "homeless person" is sometimes considered more offensive than "person experiencing homelessness" despite not using different words.
It is arbitrary that "colored people" is more offensive than "people of color" and those sorts of connotations can be difficult for people learning the language. However, it is not particularly confusing if you spend much time the country. A good rule of thumb is that progressives tend to use "person of/with ______"
Personally, I think that American English has simpler etiquette than many languages spoken in Europe. Portuguese has three different words for "you" depending on rank, with different connotations in different regions of Portugal and Brazil. I'd much rather take "POC" than deal with that.
"Yellow alert" fooled me for a second. That was mean."
Nah, you're just a racist ;) Why the hell do we even have BIPOC? Several snowflakes get to be grouped into BIPOC, which is redundant anyway? Black, Indigenous, and People of Color...because Black & Indigenous aren't? Isn't that RACIST? And why is it okay to say People Of Color but not Colored People?
It's the Judaean Peoples' Front all over again...
I am old, probably much older than the average IMBW reader. I think the world is ending, which is OK with me because, hey I got mine. Seriously, I think the amount of stupid in the world is at a super-critical level and will result in a massive and nearly instantaneous release of a wave of mindless, dull. empty headedness which will sweep around the world. In the wake of the Super-Stupid tsunami will be the true zombie apocolypse, humans, frozen, unable to act, " am I a racist, am I an anti-racist, am I an unconcious racist, am I a concious racist, what is race, what is a racist........."
Never underestimate the power of 420 words stupidly strung together.
Wait, is it April 1st, isn't 420 an old code for pot smokers? Just coincidence? I have so many questions.
Also the birthday and death day of a certain Austrian born painter
I find it hard to believe 1500 people go missing a day in the US. That's a staggering number and some of those people probably just went on an unplanned shopping trip.
The missing persons numbers in America typically include unsubstantiated reports. Many of these cases that involve children are in fact custody disputes, errors or, yes, runaways, which, while not inconsistent with claims of kidnapping, are rarely the image of the serial child abductors we imagine when it comes to things like Amber Alerts.
I realize that the problems with missing persons numbers, or the ever-elusive "trafficking" made up numbers, are not the target of this article, but in point of fact you cannot really meaningfully discuss this issue without wading into the dubious statistics and self-serving reports of the very bipartisan and ideologically diverse NGO complex (it includes plenty of evangelical activists; see also "The Sound of Freedom" and the crazed conspiracy theories involving widespread "elite" child trafficking).
California simply added an entirely new dimension of unnecessary moral panic.
This is probably true, but you must also recall the US is very large. The Texas of countries, one could call it - right down to the even larger rival that wins land area contests hands down but we don't talk about it because it's faraway and cold.
Don't worry though; I'm sure Dad will be back with the milk soon.
Very funny and welcome treat coming to me just after I listened to the Making Sense podcast wherein Sam Harris and Coleman Hughes discussed “Race and Reason”. I never would have guessed the Left would be responsible for pushing us down the slippery slope that leads to four more years of misery. Anyone know the requirements for immigration to New Zealand?
Good fucking grief
I would argue that within American culture, “white” and “black” are also ethnic groups, not races, albeit both groups using skin color and genetic background as ethnic markers
I think that's something that has been unfolding for a while even though people who should be familiar with the phenomenon of ethnogenesis have been very slow to recognize it. There's nothing in principle that would prevent ethnic groups from forming along an arbitrary line like race. After all, the other indicia of ethnicity are all equally arbitrary. But there's a certain political and moral revulsion against recognizing that race and ethnicity are so intertwined in this country that they have in fact produced new ethnic groups, particularly because the vast majority of white and black people have no meaningful ties to their predecessor cultures.
“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”
This explains so-called “alternative transportation” organizations too. Consider for example the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition:
https://sdbikecoup.substack.com/archive?sort=new
I can’t wait until I am the subject of an “Ivory Alert”
Speaking of racism, we add an unhealthy dollop of misandry in Canada. Indigenous and white ally virtue-signallers are always going on about 'missing and murdered Indigenous women' and ignoring the fact that the number of missing & murdered Indigenous men is often just a few corpses close to M&M Indigenous women. But we don't talk about *that* here....
What concerns me about the balkanization of these alerts is not desensitization so much as selective sensitization.
See, you write about Amber Alerts being the thing that makes people think the world is ending until they actually check their phones and see it's only that Toyotathon has claimed another victim, but that situation is avoidable; you can actually *opt out* of Amber Alerts while still receiving presidential ones. And if they make more types of alerts, that opens the possibility to opt-in to only those you care about - now for example a racist can say "I don't much care for those featherheads, but I'll subscribe to the Ebony Alerts because Black Lives Matter and others don't." Separate-but-equal proving itself unequal once again.
Thus we create another double-bind like the one you mention, where the only way this doesn't violate equal protection is if none of the alerts actually do anything useful, which would be a problem itself.
Damm you're funny!
Why stop at those alerts, let’s not forget intersectionality!