Many white Americans are questioning — even resenting — the continued focus by Black America on the disappearance and death of Nolan Wells. To them, he’s just a teenager who made some bad choices. To us, he’s another Black child who mysteriously disappeared and later was found deceased.
Our history and natural inclination is to question whether Nolan fell prey to some evil force.
Megan Black
I know what it feels like to be preyed upon. When I was in high school, a repeated mystery noise at my bedroom window shattered my sense of safety one night. When I woke my mom to tell her of the noise, she tiredly searched my room but found nothing. Once we settled back into bed, the noise continued, and the feeling of unease grew.
Instead of waking my mother again, in fear of her coming up empty-handed again, I went to sleep in the living room. The next morning my mother discovered a note on the outside of my bedroom window with a phone number. Later that day we learned our adult male neighbor had been watching me. He had trespassed into our backyard, and he hoped to lure me from my room. My parents reported the incident to the police, which yielded no case number, no investigation and no punishment to the neighbor because “nothing bad happened.” Eventually the neighbor moved.
Nolan Xavier Wells’ disappearance and death reminds me I am one of the lucky little Black kids who didn’t go missing. Not because the threat wasn’t real, but because I had parents who acted, family members who supported and a community that did everything in their power to restore my sense of safety and security.
In 2023, 563,389 people were reported missing in the United States; of that total, 162,755 were people of color under the age of 18. Across the United States a quiet emergency continues to unfold. One that rarely makes front‑page news, rarely receives prime‑time coverage and rarely sparks the national mobilization we see when other children disappear. Black children make up more than one‑third of all missing children in America, yet their cases remain underreported, under‑searched for and undervalued.
“America cannot claim to value children while ignoring the ones who go missing in silence.”
This disparity is not accidental. It is the result of long‑standing structural biases etched into how disappearances are classified, how risk is communicated and how the media decides which children are “newsworthy.” Researchers have a name for this imbalance — “missing white girl syndrome” — and its consequences are visible throughout the country.
When a Black child disappears, they are far more likely to be labeled a runaway — a designation that shuts off AMBER Alerts, reduces urgency and signals to the public that the child acted of their own free will. When, in actuality, runaway status often masks trafficking, exploitation or unsafe home environments. This is a misclassification with life‑and‑death consequences.
From 2018 to 2024, I worked as a mental health rehabilitation specialist at a group home for youth survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in California’s Central Valley. I witnessed youth survivors who arrived emotionally and mentally broken, battling drug addiction, slowly rebuild themselves. Many of the young women who were placed in the group home had been preyed upon by people who were supposed to protect and guide them. They had been manipulated, forced into selling their bodies and struggled to survive through despair. My role was to ensure their safety and support them through their trauma healing and recovery.
California is a state that prides itself on being a national leader in equity, innovation and public safety. In 2024 it implemented the Ebony Alert Program — the first system in the nation designed to counteract the inequities Black missing children face. However, this one state alert system alone cannot fix the deeper problem: Black children —like Jonecia Brown— still struggle to get the same level of attention, compassion and institutional response other children receive without question. Media outlets continue to amplify cases that fit a narrative of innocence and relatability, leaving Black children’s stories underreported and undervalued.
If America is serious about equity, we must treat the disappearance of Black children as the public‑safety emergency it is. That means confronting runaway bias, strengthening federal partnerships between law enforcement and community-based organizations that have been filling the gaps, and demanding that media outlets apply the same compassion and national attention to the stories of Black missing children as their counterparts.
America cannot claim to value children while ignoring the ones who go missing in silence.
Black children deserve to be searched for. They deserve to be seen. They deserve to be found.
Megan Black is a Public Voices Fellow on public health with The OpEd Project and Blue Shield California Foundation.