Would they care if they were white? Missing DC Girls

​Have you received an amber alert on your phone lately about any missing girls of color? Or have you seen constant news coverage of any of these missing children? 

Source: TMZ.com

​Any? 

Source: HBCU Buzz

​ Just one? 

But we can remember missing cases like JonBenét Ramsey, who still to this day gets news coverage and her story occurred back in 1996!

Why is it that whenever missing children of color go missing, the media goes silent?

On social media, people are using the hashtag #MissingDcGirls to voice frustration over lack of media coverage in cases of missing black and Latina girls.

According to cnn.com In a letter Tuesday, the lawmakers asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey to "devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly, or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed."

"(W)hen children of color go missing, authorities often assume they are runaways rather than victims of abduction," they added. 

An outcry on social media has drawn increased attention to the issue this month and triggered the calls for federal law enforcement officials to investigate.

CNN stated that still, numbers alone do not tell the entire story, DC City Council member Trayon White told HLN's Michaela Pereira in an interview Friday.

"What the community is alarmed about -- we had a 10-year-old girl missing the other day, but there was no amber alert," White said. "We just feel like, you know if this was a white person or from another neighborhood, there would be more alarm about it."

This happens all too often where white children receive amber alerts while children of color seem to continue to slide under the radar.

According to journalismcenter.org, there is a system aside from Amber alerts that is used only for children of color called Rilya alerts. Rilya alerts are named in honor of Rilya Wilson, who disappeared unnoticed from Florida’s foster care system at age 4.

Why are there two separate systems for missing children, you might ask. When any child goes missing there should not be ranking order.

According to journalismcenter.org, the need for an extra alert system for racial minorities stems largely from a phenomenon known as “Missing White Girl Syndrome" — a tendency by the news media to cover the murders and abductions of affluent or middle-class white girls far more than those of boys, poor kids and kids of color, especially African-Americans.

​An estimated 42 percent of missing children are black.

This is why it is up to us to continue to use our social media platforms to bring awareness to issues that most of the time go overlooked.

For the people want to say ‘all lives matter’, if that statement is true…then why must we continue to prove that Black lives are worth saving too?