X-NUPop-Charset: English
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 12:28:37 -0600 (CST)
From: "Alan Spector" <spector@calumet.purdue.edu>
Sender: spector@calumet.purdue.edu
Reply-To: spector@calumet.purdue.edu
To: revs@csf.colorado.edu
Subject: The last seven days of REVS
>From Alan Spector, founder and editor/manager of REVS:

Oct. 10, 1995  11:55 a.m. CST (USA)

To the REVS membership:

This is a clarification of what procedures were implemented over the past
seven days and why they were implemented.  During the first week in October,
Robert Johnson posted a message which offered an explanation of who, other
than O.J. Simpson, may have been responsible for the murder of Nicole Brown
Simpson.  In that posting he also called into question Ms. Brown's behavior
and seemed to imply that her murderers may have come from her connections
with various criminal elements.  That is, in my opinion, one of many
possible theories.

The problem arose when Mr. Johnson used a common anti-woman, (sexist) insult
to describe Ms. Brown.  This went beyond the bounds of what I felt, and
still believe, should be tolerated on a network such as this, just as we
should not tolerate a neo-Nazi posting a message calling all Jews sub-human
or a white racist hurling traditional anti-black insults across this
network.  It was not, and is not, my intention to publicly humiliate Mr.
Johnson, (despite his threats to try to do the same to me), nor to force him
to "apologize" to those on the list he insulted. And there never was any
decision to permanently remove him from the REVS list. I did want some kind
of acknowledgement that the particular sexist terminology was unsuitable,
may possibly put the whole list in danger of a libel suit, and in any case,
that while opinions, and even sharp criticisms were acceptable on REVS,
verbal abuse that attacks all members of particular racial, ethnic,
or sexual groups would be avoided.

The problem was magnified by my four day trip to Washington D.C. to attend a
conference at Howard University on opposing racism on campus.  I was
concerned that in my absence, the entire list might be engulfed in verbal
attacks, including personal attacks, and that this could, in turn, cause
another fifty or one hundred people to unsub from REVS.  Such debates
are not necessarily bad, but if there were to be such debates, I, as
founder and editor of the list, whose name is visible to any of the
millions of people who might log on to the REVS archives,  wanted to
be involved in the discussions, in part to differentiate between personal
opinions and what observers might believe are the opinions of "the REVS
list."  Keep in mind that REVS is not a membership club, but it has some of
the aspects of one, and it is easy for some to mistake the views of some
writers with the assumed "views" of the whole network.

In that situation, perhaps the best thing would have been to
simply shut REVS down completely for the four days; in any case, I made
the decision to postpone Mr. Johnson's postings to the network until
I had time to discuss these issues with him.


As of now, there are new procedures being implemented to ensure that the two
constituencies of REVS can have their rights maintained--those who want the
freedom to read and post whatever they want, and those who would appreciate
some help in filtering out postings not focused on their interests so that
they do not have to have their time wasted, much as someone might give a
secretary the authority to discard irrelvant mail.

This will be explained in another posting later today.  Thanks for your
patience and support.

Alan Spector