Last night on the Sarah Silverman show, she and a black waiter got into an argument about whether it was harder to be black or Jewish in America. So they decided to walk a mile in each other's shoes.
She went to a makeup artist friend and asked him to make her look black. He gave her a minstrel job, like Ted Danson wore to Whoopee's party, with shiny black grease paint and big white lips. She goes walking down the street and everyone is cursing her, telling her how disgusting she is, one guy hoped she would rot in hell. She thinks to herself, I had no idea it was it was this bad for black folks.
She goes back to the restaurant and tells the waiter she was wrong, it was much harder to be black than Jewish in America. He says no I was wrong, it's terrible being Jewish in America. He is wearing an obviously fake big nose, black ringlets like the hasidic Jews wear and a tee shirt that reads "I [heart] money".
A side note, I just googled "hasidic jew" to see what they called those ringletts and at the top of the result screen a message is shown that says
Offensive search results
We're disturbed by about these results as well. Please read our note here - www.google.com/explanation
Looks like I stepped over the line by typing the word Jew:
An explanation of our search results.
If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.
A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.
If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:
shakti.trincoll.edu
jewishworldreview.com
Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.
We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Never seen this before. |
