FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
Now commentator Lester Spence shares his thoughts on what happens when race and economics try to hook up on the Internet.
Professor LESTER SPENCE (Political Science, Johns Hopkins University): For those who don't know, Craigslist is an Internet service created by Craig Newmark in the late ‘90s and is now available worldwide. If you want to get a job in San Francisco and see who's hiring, Craigslist is your spot. If you had a bad day and want to rant about it, Craigslist is your spot.
I know someone who met a sister at the grocery store. He caught her eye and talked with her for about 15 minutes while they waited to pay for their groceries. He never got her name but he wanted to ask her out. So after he left, what was the first thing he did? He went on Craigslist and put an ad in the personals looking for the fine artist wearing white after Labor Day that he met at Super Fresh. Now, I don't know if he found her, but that's not the point.
If you want to advertise, if you want to meet people, if you want to purchase or sell, Craigslist is your spot. One of the many things Craigslist is also used for is to sell houses and to find roommates for apartments and houses that are already occupied. Turns out that some folks on Craigslist are pretty picky about who they sell to and about who they want to live with them. And some of these people have made their desires public.
I'm looking for a roommate for a house with three bedrooms. Please, no blacks wanted. That wasn't the exact wording of the ad that got civil rights advocates up in arms, but the tone was the same. A number of people looking to rent out homes or apartments, as well as a number of people just looking for roommates, expressed that they did not want blacks specifically or non-whites in general to apply.
Over 200 such ads were flagged in Chicago alone. As a result, Craigslist was sued for violating the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which makes housing discrimination illegal. But when the case finally made its way through the court it was thrown out. Craigslist is basically a third-party publisher. They do not create the content themselves, rather they are simply an electronic bulletin board people used to place their own content.
My position on the decision is mixed. I know that housing discrimination is one of the hardest things to prove and one of the most hurtful forms of discrimination. And I also know that Craigslist itself bans discriminatory ads and remove the ads as soon as they are found. In fact, when you even try to post a real-estate ad either selling a house or advertising openings in an apartment or looking for a roommate, the first page you see is one noting the penalties for violating the housing discrimination law.
But here's a difficulty: racism morphs overtime in response to changes in political context, social context and technological context. The tactics that were prevalent in the ‘50s as a way to keep blacks from living in certain places, racial covenants that prevented new buyers from selling to African-Americans, real-estate agent codes that made it unethical to change the racial composition of a neighborhood, were outlawed. It behooves those of us who study racism as well as those of us who fight racism in our everyday practice to be more aware of the possibilities that the Internet affords for the practice of racism.
Further, we need to design strategies that will both target the offender and make it difficult for a third party such as Craigslist to serve as facilitators.
CHIDEYA: Lester Spence is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
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