Here's some food for thought. However- if ethic slurs bother you, don't read any further. If you do continue, remember that these words are here as part of the story. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Last week I was listening to the Tavis Smiley show on WFPL. In case you don't know who he is, Tavis is the first African-American to have his own NPR talk show. His show is devoted to mainly dealing with information that affects African Americans and other minorities.
One of his guests was a returning commentator who had expressed displeasure at the amount of "racially biased" material that could be found on eBay. Specifically, those items that contained the word "nig*er" in the title. Unfortunately for our country, these items were perfectly acceptable in their time and were products that our great-great-granparents used on a daily basis. However, they are classified as African-Americana now and are somewhat collectible. Okay. Tavis' guest mentioned that he had also done a word search for Kike, Mick, Hebe, Cracker, Wetback, Spick, Dago, etc and found nothing. The "N-Word" (for you purists) was the only racial slur he could find. Still with me? Here's the fun part. I decided to do my own search on eBay just to see what would turn up. Using the n-word as a search and Safari as my browser, I got zilch. So I tried the others. Zilch. I then went for a biggie and tried "Nazi". Zilch. On a hunch, I switched back to Netscape 7.0. Strangely enough, searching for the n-word, I got over 300 hits. Searching for Nazi gave me over 1400 hits. Interesting how Apple is censoring us without us even realizing it. What else is being kept from us? | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be March 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
