Site for Blacks Attracts Slurs After Arrest of Professor

clipped from www.nytimes.com Site for Blacks Attracts Slurs After Arrest of Professor By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA It was probably inevitable that in the furor over the arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., some people would resort publicly to the ugly racial slurs that have largely disappeared from polite conversation. But it is hard to imagine a more incongruous place for such comments than The Root, an online magazine of politics and culture largely by and for black people, where Mr. Gates is editor in chief. Yet there they were last week, in comments on an interview with Dr. Gates, who was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on a disorderly conduct charge that was quickly dropped. A few commenters used grotesque racial epithets, others crudely parodied black speech, and some proudly called themselves racist. One used the screen name of James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/business/media/27root.html