Tag: race

California just created the ‘Ebony Alert’ to find missing Black children

California’s newly enacted “Ebony Alert” law is the first of its kind in the nation to prioritize the search for Black youth gone missing. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 673 into law on Sunday, making California the first state to create an alert notification system — similar to an Amber Alert — to address the crisis of missing Black children and young women.  

The law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, will allow the California Highway Patrol to activate the alert upon request from local law enforcement when a Black youth goes missing in the area. The Ebony Alert will utilize electronic highway signs and encourage use of radio, TV, social media and other systems to spread information about the missing persons’ alert. The Ebony Alert will be used for missing Black people aged 12 to 25. 

“Data shows that Black and brown, our indigenous brothers and sisters, when they go missing there’s very rarely the type of media attention, let alone AMBER alerts and police resources that we see with our white counterparts,” state Sen. Steven Bradford, also a Democrat and creator of the legislation, told NBC News earlier this year. 

He added: “We feel it’s well beyond time that we dedicate something specifically to help bring these young women and girls back home because they’re missed and loved just as much as their counterparts are.”  

About 141,000 Black children under the age of 18 went missing in 2022, and Black women over 21 accounted for nearly 16,500 missing persons cases that year, according to the most recent data from the National Crime Information Center. More than 30,000 Black people in the U.S. remained missing at the end of 2022, according to the center. Although about 38% of the people who went missing i in 2022 were Black, according to the Black and Missing Foundation, missing Black people are less likely than white people to have their stories highlighted in the media. Also, missing persons cases for Black people remain open longer than those for white people. Derrica Wilson, co-founder of the foundation, told CNN that a majority of the 6,000 cases of missing Black people in her database remain unsolved. 

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Lone Democrat Who Opposed Marijuana Banking Bill In Senate Committee Explains His Vote

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was the sole Democrat to vote against a marijuana banking reform bill during a committee markup last month. In a new interview, the senator described his vote as an effort at making important equity improvements while there’s still a chance to do so.

“I’m worried that if we pass a bill with all of the fees and the revenue that comes, and not begin to address the issue of restorative justice, we’re not going to go back and get those communities,” Warnock said during an appearance on Crooked Media’s Lovett or Leave It podcast that was posted on Sunday. Black and brown people especially, he said, have been “hollowed out by half a century of the so-called war on drugs for using marijuana.”

Warnock was discussing the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act, which would protect banks that service state-legal marijuana markets from being punished by federal regulators.

“What it does is it allows businesses and banks to participate with cannabis businesses in states where it’s legal,” Warnock explained, “and so it creates a safe space for them. But the communities that have been most devastated by the so-called war on drugs, [it] doesn’t do a thing for them at all.”

“My question was, ‘Who are we really making safer?’”

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Canadian Govt Funds $5,000 Bonuses for Employers to Hire Anyone Other Than Straight White Men

A new Canadian government-funded program is offering $5,000 bonuses to British Columbia construction companies to hire apprentices who identify as anything other than a straight white male.

From Western Investor, “B.C. employers get $5,000 more if apprentices ‘self-identify’ “:

B.C. construction companies which hire trade apprentices who self-identify as other than a straight, white male with no disability will receive double a new government incentive, pushing it to $10,000 for the first year of employment.

The $10 million Apprenticeship Services program, being offered by the B.C. Construction Association (BCCA) and announced September 27, provides cash incentives to small and medium-sized construction employers who hire and register first-year apprentices in up to 39 Red Seal trades.

Funding for what the BCCA calls the “most far-reaching construction trade apprenticeship drive ever undertaken in British Columbia” is under the federal government’s Canadian Apprenticeship Strategy, which launched in September 2022.

Since then the project has issued financial incentives for the hiring and registering of 1,329 apprentices and sent payments to more than 700 employers.

The BCCA will pay employers $5,000 for each first-year apprentice they register in any eligible Red Seal trades. However, if an applicant self-identifies as a woman, person with disabilities, Indigenous, racialized Canadian or from the 2SLGBTQI+ community, the incentive doubles to $10,000.

[…] So far, 51 per cent of the project apprentices have declared themselves to be a member of one of an “equity deserving group,” according to a BCCA release.

This takes “train your replacement” to a whole new level!

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Why Is TED Scared of Color Blindness?

Like any young writer, I am well aware that an invitation to speak at TED can be a career-changing opportunity. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I was invited to appear at this year’s annual conference. What I could not have imagined from an organization whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading” is that it would attempt to suppress my own. 

As an independent podcaster and author, I count myself among the lucky few who can make a living doing what they truly love to do. Nothing about my experience with TED could change that. The reason this story matters is not because I was treated poorly, but because it helps explain how organizations can be captured by an ideological minority that bends even the people at the very top to its will. In that, the story of TED is the story of so many crucial and once-trustworthy institutions in American life.

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Gas station sparks backlash over sign banning Romani women

A Chevron gas station in Rowland Heights, California has triggered outrage over an ostensibly anti-shoplifting sign that banned women of Romani descent from the premises.

“The sign contained two ethnic slurs commonly used to portray Romanis as traveling thieves,” reported Nicole Comstock for CBS News. “‘It’s been used against them as a weapon frequently,’ said Hemet resident Anya Regewell. ‘Much like the N-word is to Black people, Gypsy that’s what that is to Romani people from Europe.’ Regewell said a Romani community member sent her a picture of the sign. Since then, she has tried to call the gas station and took the issue to social media, hoping that it will get the hateful sign removed.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits businesses from excluding people based on racial or ethnic categories.

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West Point is SUED by group that ended affirmative action after Biden allowed academy to discriminate against white applications – even though Army has MORE black soldiers than general population

A campaign group which successfully ended affirmative action is now suing New York’s prestigious West Point military academy, claiming it discriminates against white applicants. 

Students for Fair Admissions, founded by Edward Blum, is seeking to erase an exemption in the SCOTUS ruling which is allowing US Army schools to keep using race as a factor in admissions. 

It cited the example of two white high schoolers it believes were perfect candidates for the prestigious upstate New York school, who Students for Fair Admissions believes are banned under current rules ‘from competing for admission on an equal footing’. 

This comes after President Joe Biden pushed for the military to be allowed to continue filtering applications by race – despite the racial makeup of the Army already being more diverse than the general population. 

The Biden administration’s push for so-called positive discrimination to achieve ‘equity’ comes despite the Army having a greater proportion of black soldiers than the general population – and only slightly fewer Hispanic recruits. 

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Biden implies black and Hispanic workers don’t have ‘high school diplomas’ — and WH tries to clean it up in official transcript

President Biden has been ripped after he inferred that African American and Hispanic workers don’t have “high school diplomas” in another humiliating gaffe.

The 80-year-old president was touting the economy at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland on Thursday when he made his latest blunder.

“We’ve seen record lows in unemployment particularly — and I’ve focused on this my whole career — particularly for African Americans and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, the workers without high school diplomas,” he said in televised remarks.

However, according to the transcript released by the White House, there was supposed to be the word “and” separating the African American, Hispanic workers and veterans from those without high school diplomas.

Biden’s speech would then read: “We’ve seen record lows in unemployment particularly — and I’ve focused on this my whole career — particularly for African Americans and Hispanic workers and veterans, you know, and the workers without high school diplomas.”

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Musician Akon Says Black Americans Could Move to Africa, Become Millionaires, Cripple US ‘Overnight’

R&B singer Akon may have been born in the United States, but he wants to go back to his roots — which, to him, means constructing a city in his family’s ancestral home of Senegal, which he describes as a “real-life Wakanda.”

Ordinarily, I’d just think this was some idle talk by someone not in compos mentis. After all, one of Akon’s best-known songs was a collaboration with enthusiastic marijuana endorser Snoop Dogg (“I Wanna Love You”), so maybe Akon’s been hitting the wacky tobaccky a bit too often.

However, nothing short of megadoses of LSD could possibly have produced the delusions described by the singer in his promotional push on “Akon City,” in which he promised “every single African American would be a millionaire without even thinking twice” if they relocated to Africa and that America would be paralyzed “overnight” if its estimated 41.6 million black population up and left.

According to a report in AfroTech on Friday, the proposed city in the troubled West African nation of Senegal — which Akon says can be built for the low, low investment price of $6 billion — is intended “to be a safe space for Black Americans and others facing racial injustices.”

“The system back home treats them unfairly in so many different ways that you can never imagine. And they only go through it because they feel that there is no other way,” Akon said in 2020, according to The Associated Press, adding that the proposed African city would be a “home back home.”

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Parent Slams California School For Holding ‘No Whites Allowed’ Kids Playdate

A parent at a California elementary school has slammed officials for sanctioning a playdate for kids that essentially segregated them by race, and excluded white children.

A flyer for the event at Anthony Chabot Elementary School in Oakland, CA notes that it is “for black, brown and API families.”

“If your family identifies as Black, Brown, or API or are [sic] a parent/caregiver of a Black, Brown, or API student. Come hang out while we get a chance to know each other and build our community as we kick off this schoolyear [sic],” reads the invite to the event.

Ironically it was hosted by the school ‘equity & inclusion committee’.

Taking to social media, the parent noted “I dunno about others, but I’m genuinely upset about what ultimately boils down to a “No whites allowed” playdate.”

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Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, “MM,” in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own.”

“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter,” states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, “and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s
daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn’t be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don’t appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It’s happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was “a different ethnicity” from her.

This situation isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It comes amidst a decades-long moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns (“if you see something, say something”) to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the “signs” these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on “children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone” and people who seem “nervous.” Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family “should” look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to “stop sex trafficking” via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

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