Paul, I personally have to thank you for this bit of history. While I
certainly had the feeling that the authors of this program were engaging in
the worst kind of racial stereotyping, I couldn't manage to quite find any
proof until I had the references to the Legion of Doom and Masters of
Deception. They produced the following excerpts in my searches:
.....
Using the jive program is the electronic equivalent of appearing in
blackface - a crude, minstrel show in cyberspace: "Some nigga' name
Co'rupt, havin' been real active befo'e, duzn't gots' some so'kin' computa'
anymo'e and so ... sheeit, duh."
(at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.12/hacker_pr.html)
Jive turns regular English into "the electronic equivalent of blackface" --
replete with uses of the word "nigger" and phrases like "slap mah 'fro."
(at http://www.kkc.net/eyenet/1995/net0817.htm)
......
So I think we can pretty much kill the pseudo-ignorant "Oh it wasn't poking
fun at anybody specifically" attitude.
--Chip Morton
At 07:15 AM 2/25/2003, Paul Robinson wrote:
Actually, the history of jive is an interesting one. If I remember
correctly, the Legion of Doom created to make fun of another hacking group
that they hated called Masters of Deception. LoD was composed mostly of
white middle-class kids whose parents would buy them the latest and greatest
hardware they asked for. MoD had to make do with scrabbling around for bits
of kit in bins and were generally C64 freaks at the time. I'm sure that the
fact that they were all Afro-Carribean didn't come into.
In other words, jive owes it's existence to a desire of white middle-class
pricks to make fun of black working-class kids.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
|
