During the year 2004, many minorities and people of all races were viciously attacked by racial slurs which were publicly posted on the Internet. Minorities have endured racial slurs, death threats and the violence which these words lead to for years, decades and centuries. From the days of U.S. slavery when minorities were addressed by racial slurs rather than their names, to the days of U.S. Concentration camps, less than 70 years ago, in which a vast number of Oregon residents insulted, abused and imprisoned Japanese-Americans simply because of their skin color.

But now, this petition is requesting that public Internet organizations, companies, businesses and multinational corporations which have historically permitted those racial slurs... to please make those websites private if it is within their technical ability. This petition is not involved in the issue of deleting words from websites as that is a larger freedom of speech issue.

What inspired this petition?

This petition was inspired by the fact that an entire group of minorities were recently the victims of a repeated, vicious, unprovoked, public attack of racial slurs. The individual or group that posted the racial slurs used a public weblog (blog) account hosted by an Oregon based company known as LiveJournal.com. The individual or group first published their racial slurs on a public indymedia account. Then they continued their vicious, unrelenting assault, by publishing the exact same post into a livejournal blog account so that their words could be seen by the entire world.

Many different LiveJournal staff were repeatedly requested to place the website with the racial slurs on a private, non-public, setting known as 'friends only' mode, which the LiveJournal terms of service states that LiveJournal will do for racially offensive, objectionable posts. The LiveJournal staff quickly stated that their feelings about the racial slurs were that "we agree that the content in question is disturbing and in poor taste" but in the case of minorities, they refused to consider it racially offensive enough to remove. In addition, a LiveJournal staff specifically stated that the LiveJournal staff would wait for an incident and/or words involving "physical harm" and "violence" to occur before they would begin to consider doing anything. [Words in quotations quoted directly from the LiveJournal Abuse Team Manger And Staff responses to this matter].

However, this matter does not focus directly, nor solely on LiveJournal, but on all website companies worldwide which allow racial slurs which attack people of all races to remain on websites that are public, rather than private.

What is at stake?

Whenever an African-American boy or girl types the name of their mother, who has been a civil-rights activist all of her life, into any search engine, the search engine will bring up public websites from all over the world which are filled with racial slurs against that child's mother. Whenever a Native American boy or girl types the name of an activist group that their mother, father or grandparents belonged to into a search engine...

...the search engine will bring up countless, public websites that are filled with racial slurs and insults against that group. Many of the public websites are free (blog) accounts so they stay on the Internet forever, long after the owner stops using the website. As has historically been the case, at the very least, these racial slurs are used to slander, mislead, demean and terrify minorities.

Who Can Help?

No matter what race you belong to, no matter what country you live in, we ask you to place your name on this petition if you are one of the following:

• If you are a person who believes that public racial slurs posted on the worldwide Internet against minorities, or against people of any race is wrong, please sign this.
  
  
• If you are a person who believes that it is wrong for someone to post racial slurs on a public Internet website about your family, or your children, or the multiracial peace groups that they belong to, please sign this.
  
  
• If you believe that a better world is possible, please sign this.
  

What will be done with this petition?

Once a year, until the year 2010, we will organize an international day of awareness regarding corporations and people who allow racial slurs on public websites. On that day every year, we hope to attract the attention of the following people and more:

- the internet companies and multinational corporations which permit racial slurs (which attack people) to be posted onto their public websites.
- the internet search engine companies which allow such companies to have their websites indexed in their search engines and search results
- the peaceful activist groups worldwide who believe that no child, mother or father should be the victim of racial slurs posted on public websites
-the advertisers who purchase ads on the websites of those companies that allow the racial slur attacks and the advertisers of the search engine companies that index those companies.
-the shareholders who own stock in those advertisers, website companies and search engine companies.

We hope to make people aware of this injustice on August 28th of every year until the year 2010. We have chosen the date August 28th, because that is the historic day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream speech." In that speech he said "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We too have a dream, it is a simple dream. We dream that one day an African-American child, a Latino child, a Jewish child, a child of any race will not be assaulted by countless public websites filled with racial slurs about their courageous parents or their parent's groups simply because they typed their name into a search engine... or simply because of the color of their skin.

Please add your name to this petition. Help stop attacks which use public racial slurs before they lead to violence.

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