Should I report a racist chain email?

October 28, 2010 5:30 PM

How should I or shouldn't I handle letting someone / "people that matter" know about a racist email that was forwarded to me and appears to have been originated by a cop?

So I just received what I thought was a funny email with the subject line "Why you shouldn't bring your kids to the zoo." Within the email were pictures of monkeys doing various inappropriate things like sucking their own dicks, peeing into their own mouths, sticking fingers in each others buttholes, etc. "Heyo," I thought, "a funny 10 second email diversion between tasks." I happened to scroll down through the list of forwarders and recipients when I came to the originator's email which contained this comment: "Filmed on location in downtown Pontiac, as seen on the Oprah Show. R" I'm not sure how one can read anything else but overt racism in that comment. Can one? (Pontiac is ~50% African-American, Oprah is African-American, etc.)

So where this gets tricky is that after some light Internet sleuthing using the originator's name, I discovered that there is a sheriff's deputy by this name (which isn't a common one) in Oakland County, MI which is where Pontiac, MI is located. So to my (admittedly somewhat addled) mind, we have a sheriff's deputy in a highly African-American area forwarding racist emails.

So what should I do? Forward it to the sheriff's dept? Forward it to the newspaper in town? Let it go? As you might imagine I'm really riled up and have this feeling in my gut that I should "do something" but I honestly don't know what that should be. Any advice? Thanks! (And trust, saying "take a walk, cool off, and let it be" is a fine answer and frankly is what I'm leaning towards now...)

posted by anonymous to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

If the sheriff didn't originally forward it from his work email account then unfortunately there isn't much that you can do.
posted by elsietheeel at 5:35 PM on October 28, 2010

I'd say why on earth would you make it your problem to deal with? Is there even a problem?

A sherrifs deputy might have sent a *possibly* racist joke to some people, who forwarded it on and on, and you have no idea what this person's actions are in real life.... unless you want to start punishing people for thoughtcrime - let it go.
posted by TravellingDen at 5:47 PM on October 28, 2010 [5 favorites]

If you found the name which you think is the same as a sheriff's in the list of people who purportedly received/sent it before the person who sent it to you, you have no legitmate basis for accusing (in either a private or public forum) the sheriff of being a racist. You don't know that the originator email address is genuine. You don't know it belongs to the sheriff. Tell the person who sent it to you that it's racist and offensive, but don't go gunning for some person you don't know, just because he's got a name like the one associated with an offensive thing someone else sent you.
posted by crush-onastick at 5:49 PM on October 28, 2010

Your conclusions are too tenuous. Let it go.
posted by amro at 6:01 PM on October 28, 2010 [4 favorites]

People have the right to obnoxious beliefs. They don't have the right to discriminate. ("The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins" as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said.) I think this falls into the "obnoxious beliefs" category.
posted by Houstonian at 6:07 PM on October 28, 2010

Email headers are easy to fake; doubly so if you're just looking at a quoted "From" line in the text. For instance, if you'd asked this question under your real username, anybody here could make the message body look like it originated from you, and I'm guessing at least a quarter of us could fake header info too.
posted by Pinback at 6:08 PM on October 28, 2010 [5 favorites]

If the sheriff didn't originally forward it from his work email account then unfortunately there isn't much that you can do.

Huh why? Cops have been fired for sending racist emails, they don't have to send it from work. For example. They don't say if he used his work email or not but it's hard to imagine it would have made much of a difference.

People have the right to obnoxious beliefs. They don't have the right to discriminate.

You don't think it's a problem for people who hold those views and share them freely to be cops?

---

And yes, while it's theoretically possible that the email headers were forged, it's somewhat unlikely. Why would anyone forge the guy's name in some random email chain letter.
posted by delmoi at 6:52 PM on October 28, 2010

I guess I'm missing how this is racist if it actually was at least purportedly sent by a sheriff in Pontiac. I'm not sure how the racial make-up of Pontiac makes this a racist email; it sounds as though that's just where this chain email originated (again, purportedly). This sounds like a bizarre email joke that got forwarded so many times the Pontiac reference no longer made sense.
posted by pecanpies at 8:23 PM on October 28, 2010

While there is no shortage of bigoted authorities in our wonderful United States, from top to bottom, it is trivially easy to fake an email address.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:04 PM on October 28, 2010

>>And yes, while it's theoretically possible that the email headers were forged, it's somewhat unlikely. Why would anyone forge the guy's name in some random email chain letter.

One word: Politics

Sheriffs are elected in my neck of the woods.
posted by Ys at 9:11 PM on October 28, 2010

If you really feel you have to do something about it, forward it onwards several times through web mail addresses you've created specifically for this purpose. Then, from the last of those, forward it back to the originator along with a polite note suggesting that it appears to have originally come from them, and it can be interpreted as racist and offensive. Then don't return to the last link in your chain. You get to make your point directly to the possibly racist person in question, and you get to stay reasonably safe doing it.

There's a sense in which I hesitate to recommend this, because even done politely, it's a bit creepy, and a bit passive aggressive. However, I also think if someone was faking racist emails under my name, I'd want to know about it, even if the news arrived anonymously.
posted by Ahab at 4:31 AM on October 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

It sounds like a lot of people had an opportunity to edit this email to say anything they wanted it to say. If some random person came to me with a 5th or 6th or Nth generation chain e-mail that implicated my deputy as racist, it'd probably go:

"Did you send this?"
"No."
"Okay."

And into the garbage. I mean, do what you gotta do, but I think you're just spinning your wheels here.
posted by Menthol at 8:09 AM on October 29, 2010

Mod note: comment removed, please link to personal information, not quote it inline. Thanks
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:57 AM on October 29, 2010