In the United States, a lawsuit has been filed against the internet ad site Craigslist for violating fair-housing practices. Cited in the lawsuit were ads for roommates that said such things as "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out", and "Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male". Craigslist began as a personal project in San Francisco, a way for people to look for and advertise employment. It now has sites for people in London, Johannesburg, Paris and many other cities around the world.
In the United States, most of the articles about the lawsuit against Craigslist have focused on the questions of regulating the internet, of making it conform to the same standards and laws as other media. But I wonder what we are really accomplishing.
Does regulating public expression have an effect on private thought and does it matter? When David Irving was jailed in Austria in February 2006 for denying the Nazi holocaust of the Jews during the second world war, I was fascinated. According to the reports I read, the judge repeatedly asked Irving if he still held the views, the public expression of which had led to his arrest and trial. Irving denied that he held them, but as one newspaper account put it, in convicting him the jury showed it did not believe him.
In a trial that had the rule of law at its heart, the more relevant question would be whether he would publicly deny the holocaust in Austria again. What seems to have been at issue was not Irving's actions, but his beliefs. Is it possible to police thought? And should we even try, as the judge in Irving's trial attempted to do?
"Discriminatory housing advertisements contaminate the housing market, stigmatize the people who are discouraged or excluded from housing, and mislead people into thinking that it is normal and acceptable to select tenants on the basis of race, gender, religion or family status", wrote Laurie Wardell, one of the attorneys filing the lawsuit against Craigslist.
Yet what these laws do is perpetuate an illusion. They do not protect people. Early in the days of Craigslist I remember reading a question posted by a frustrated black man who was looking for a room to rent in New York. He felt that when he went to view apartments to share, people of other races changed their minds about him when they met him because they didn't want to live with a black man. His question was, should he put his race in his ad and replies to ads or not? My instinct would have been to tell him not to, but I was swayed by the blunt wisdom of one man who replied succinctly: "Yes, put your race in. Why waste your time going to meet bigots?"
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During this period of the fellowship, she will be travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (August 2005)
"Art and suffering: four years since 9/11" (August 2005)
"Rebranding America" (September 2005)
"Judith Miller's race: the unasked question" (October 2005)
"France seeks a world voice" (December 2005)
"A question of class" (January 2006)
"Europe's forked tongues"
(February 2006)
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Ever since, I've held this idea in mind that practicality and self-preservation may be more important at times than principle. Recently I met a man in France, a mid-level manager for a company who said that his boss had told him if he (my acquaintance) ever hired a north African he (the boss) would fire him. The man also told me that he nonetheless interviewed north Africans and was the only person in the company to do so. It was a small gesture of defiance, but I wasn't sure what I thought about it. Is it more harmful and hurtful for a person to spend hours researching a company, prepare answers and questions, dress carefully and turn up for an interview for a positions he or she has no chance of getting than to be simply rejected from the beginning?
In the same way, the proposal in France of name-blind job applications made by the equal-opportunities committee set up after the suburban riots of late 2005, which would mask ethnicity in many cases, would only displace the bigotry by one step, since at some point in the application process names and faces must be revealed.
This brings us back to the question of illusion. Most bigoted people living in liberal democracies must know that a lot of their views are best kept private. Craigslist, moreover, has a system where an ad is automatically removed if enough people flag it as inappropriate. What happens in the best-case scenario is that bigots mingle only among their peers and are otherwise shunned. This creates a palliative illusion of non-discrimination, yet I can admit that even in my own life, I practice a form of discrimination.
I know what, on the surface, seems like a wide range of people, of all ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, ages. They tend to be well-educated expatriates, working as academics, for aid organisations, the United Nations, or as journalists. I delude myself into thinking that my circle is diverse but in reality these people have a great deal in common and I have deliberately kept it that way. In my work as a journalist I deal with, and prepare myself for, abhorrent viewpoints, but in my personal life I limit my contact with them. If someone invites me to a party, I always ask who is giving it, and I am more likely to go if the giver falls into one of my categories. In many ways, I discriminate just as much as those people who post on Craigslist.
In writing about the lawsuit against Craigslist, the New York Times reported that in December 2003 a California fair-housing group sued another housing website for posting discriminatory notices. "I am not looking for freaks, geeks, prostitutes (male or female), druggies, pet cobras, drama, Black Muslims or mortgage brokers," one said. The judge dismissed the suit and noted that the fair-housing groups were free to sue the people who posted the offensive notices.
What I am asking in this column is not what price an illusion, but what worth? Would it be better to have the prejudices out in the open and thus give others the opportunity to shun them? To be subjected to the jury of one's peers daily?
Those of us who are up for a fight can take them on either in a court of law or a court of public opinion. Those people who don't think they can endure another false rejection or dismissal can move on. The danger is that we would become little enclaves of likeminded people, but would that be any different from the world most of us live in today? It might create less hurt and anger, less disappointment and less pain. I'm still trying to figure out which way is better.