
Find Nasyre Jones, because Black kids matter
For five days, a 10-year-old boy named Nasyre Jones has been missing. He disappeared as snow fell in the city, as expectations fell in our community, and as the vast majority of the media fell silent.
And while we need to talk about police shootings and impeachment trials, Nasyre is more important than all of that, because there is no future without our children.
Nasyre was last seen at 5 p.m. Monday at 15th and Arch in Philadelphia. Sometimes he hangs out on the 6700 block of North 18th Street in West Oak Lane.
He’s 4-foot-10 and weighs 80 pounds. He’s got black hair and brown eyes, and he was last seen wearing a black jacket, black jeans and black sneakers.
Somebody’s seen this child, and if have, please call the police.
Call them because in America, Black missing kids don’t get on TV. And if you gave a TV News executive some truth serum, he would tell you that Black missing kids just don’t make good televsion.
But I got this platform, and I’m gonna tell the truth.
The truth is, a 2015 study showed that while 35 percent of the missing children in the FBI’s database were black, they amounted to only 7 percent of the news coverage.
The truth is, if missing children are not white females, they simply don’t get covered. That’s wrong. That’s racist, and it must end today. Because somebody out there has seen Nasyre Jones, and even if my media colleagues don’t care, I do. Even if they don’t want to talk about it, I do. Even if they don’t see their own kids in Nasyre, I do.
Photo: On the road. By Stefano Corso
