From: taa2@po.CWRU.Edu (Tamara A. Adrine-Davis)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: The Loss of Innocence (Was RE:  FUCK YOU)
Date: 13 Sep 1992 09:31:21 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: taa2@po.CWRU.Edu (Tamara A. Adrine-Davis)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc5.ins.cwru.edu


WARNING:  This post is a bit long, so if you have no desire to continue
reading I'd suggest "q" now.
===============================

     A few days ago I logged onto my account totally innocent.  How naive I
was in believing that cyberspace was the one place in this world where
physical attributes, such as the color of your skin, the texture of your
hair, the way in which you speak, made no difference whatsoever.  I was
laboring under the misapprehension that the Net community would somehow
escape the venomous bigotry that infects almost every institution, culture
and demographic segment of American society.  Oh sure, I knew that the
Aryan Brotherhood and similar hate-mongering fascist groups had their own
bulletin board systems.  However, they, in my blissfully unenlightened
mind, were just ignorant white trash out in the isolated mountains of Idaho
and Utah or some Southern state where one, rightly or wrongly, expects such
things.  As I sped past the various menus on my home system to get to the
menu for Usenet it never occurred to me that I would be treated to a lesson
in reality that day.  I typed in the necessary commands to get to asb and
began leisurely reading the posts whose subject headings pinged some vague
interest.  Well, seeing that asb is a place where one is very likely to run
into subject headings of a sexually provocative nature, and being a person
who is often and very happily sexually provoked, the heading "FUCK YOU"
immediately caught my eye.  Little did I know that hitting the Enter key at
the pointer would change my vision of cyberspace forever.  On my screen
emblazoned in big white letters I saw the following:

Vote for Jesse Jackson in 1992... He'll give us a REAL reason to 
HATE THE FUCKING NIGGERS!!!



FUCK YOU ALL!!


     In the space of a millisecond my mind flipped through every
conceivable reaction trying to find one that was both reasonable and
appropriate.  It never did.  What it found was an emotional response filled
with fear, rage and pain.  The reasonable thing to do would have been to
print this filth to a file, download it to disk and ship it off to the
local FBI office.  That scenario is still not out of the question given
that we now know that this "thing" was only able to reach Internet--a
federal interest computer network--as a result of computer tampering which
is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  But, that's
another article.  I don't know how long I stared at my screen that day, but
I would guess that it must have been quite a while.  Eventually, I regained
my composure enough to read the follow-ups.  I was dismayed to find that
the couple of posts in follow-up at the time simply chalked it up to some
moronic soul wasting bandwidth and didn't see the seriousness of this
situation.  There was one a few days later that suggested ignoring the
whole incident because, of course, if this individual is ignored, sie will
go away.  Then there were the ones who attributed the posting to newbies on
campus for the first time with nothing better to do.  I was, to say the
least, disappointed by the trivialization of such an emotionally violent
act perpetrated on the Net-using public.  Then, I realized who the Net-
using public is primarily composed of.  In short, middle-class white males.
Of course this segment of the population isn't predisposed to becoming
outraged at this type of heinous act!  Since when have most of them had to
worry about racial epithets being hurled while walking down the street with
no possible safe haven in which to hide?  Since when have they had to worry
about being physically assaulted because they dared drive through an ethnic
neighborhood that doesn't particularly care for non-majority "trespassers"
as I do every day?  When was the last time that one of them had a
grandfather who was run out of a Southern town under threat of being
lynched because he wouldn't take a white man fondling his sister?  These
things don't happen to white middle-class families.  They do, however,
happen to families of color, be they black, brown, red or, sometimes,
yellow.  So, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised by the laissez-
faire attitude initially expressed.  There is simply no historical or
cultural background to support much else.  I am not in anyway intimating
that there is no sensitivity, or that the initial responses were just as
bigoted as the initial post.  What I'm saying is that these contributors
had no incentive to react as I did to the words of an avowed racist hate-
monger.  I see now that there is at least one person who would like to see
other Net-users shut up about the whole thing (if you don't like it Doge,
don't read).  But again, that's another post.

     "FUCK YOU" originally appeared on September 5th.  By September 8th it
appeared that at least some Net-users had begun to consider the
implications of this vileness.  From the articles it seems that at least
one user, StarWatcher (thank you dear), contacted Portal, the compromised
system from which the offensive material was posted, and informed them of
situation.  Another, Randolph Vance, supported the notion that perhaps the
racist low-life had done something a bit more serious than simply "waste
bandwidth" and should be turned over to the proper authorities.  Still, I'm
getting the impression that most Net-users are content to just write this
off as some sick individual who shouldn't be taken seriously.  What most
fail to understand is that there are too many people out there very willing
to perpetrate this type of crime.  The number of skinheads, brown shirts
and other racist factions is growing everyday.  These people are not only
interested in making the United States more hostile to blacks and
hispanics, but also to Jews, Catholics and other non-Protestants, as well
as those residents not born on U.S. soil.  They are in favor of censorship
and an amendment to the Constitution banning abortion.  Women are more or
less chattel, though they -do- accept women into their organizations as
secondary to the men.  I mean, how can a woman properly raise the next
generation of fascist racists if she herself is not learned in the dogma of
good old fashioned "Christian" hatred?  Women's rights?  What are those? 
Women have the rights that their fathers, brothers and husbands give to
them and no more.  

     WAKE UP PEOPLE!  If this type of individual assaults one segment of
our population, in this case blacks, who will sie and others like hir go
after next?  Don't you understand that by perpetrating a crime against ONE
group, this bastard has wronged us ALL?  In this patchwork of ethnic groups
we call the United States we are bound together by only one thing--we are
Americans.  At some point in our history someone of every ethnic and racial
persuasion has fought and died in every war, from the Civil War to Desert
Storm, for this country and the ideals that it represents.  There are
people literally dying to get into this country exactly because of these
ideals.  Can't we, as American citizens, mostly born and raised here, stand
up for our own?  OK, so "FUCK YOU" doesn't apply to you because you're not
black.  Would it apply to you more if you were Italian, Greek, Asian,
Jewish, Irish-Catholic perhaps?  If disapproval is not shown by those of
you who count yourselves among the majority in this tiny little corner of
the world that we call Internet, when will I read through the Usenet again
and find a post that says "HATE THE FUCKING <insert favorite
ethnic/religious/gender classification>!!!"?  Will the post apply to you
then?  I am standing up here and now to proclaim

I AM SARTRE.  I AM A BLACK-AMERICAN WOMAN.  I AM NO LONGER INNOCENT.
                        I AM -ANGRY-.
-- 
*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*
* They appeared while sie slept, with white coats and restraints. Two of    *
* them there were, both with a slightly malevolent glint in their eyes. In  *
* they came to hover over her bed. Is it a dream, or a descent into reality?*
-- 
*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*
* They appeared while sie slept, with white coats and restraints. Two of    *
* them there were, both with a slightly malevolent glint in their eyes. In  *
* they came to hover over her bed. Is it a dream, or a descent into reality?*
Newsgroups: misc.legal