When you're getting ready to move to a brand new city, you're naturally going to want to check out the safer areas—if you can afford it. But, like any decent, civilized human being, you'll probably do research and look at crime and murders rates in the area to make your decision, instead of judging the area based on how many minorities are around.
That's exactly what the racist website, GhettoTracker.com, did for people who wanted just that. By not looking at crime rates or anything else for that matter, GhettoTracker let people go in and choose the areas they deemed "ghetto," based solely off their own prejudices. For example:
Or:
And, who exactly was this site for? Well, it wasn't very hard to guess.
As you can see, it's easy to label this site as racist. It is that, but it's also classist at its heart. It lets rich people pick out the areas where poor people live, in order to warn other rich people to stay away from there areas.
In the last few days, blogs and the like picked up on the site, and blasted its existence and its creator. So much so, that its founder (a man who identified himself as 30 something and based in Tallahassee, Florida) relaunched GhettoTracker with a new name: Good Part of Town. But, what happened to our happy, smiling, white family from GhettoTracker? You guessed it:
All forgiven? Fortunately, problems aren't solved just by throwing token minority families into the mix. The site was essentially the same bullshit. The founder responded to all the flack he received on Twitter and Facebook:
"This was originally seriously developed as a travel tool and the name 'Ghetto Tracker' was meant to be something that people would remember. Well, it worked, but unfortunately, it appears to have brought a lot of negative baggage along with it," he wrote in an email to Nitasha Tiku at Gawker.
"I can't be held responsible for the assumptions people may make in regards to factors like race and income," he continued. "I've seen comments on blogs and in twitter (sic) that are trying to say this is encouraging racism or social stratification and that was never our intention. The ideas was to make it social, as if you were asking a friend, 'Hey, I'm going to be visiting {your city} and thinking of staying at {some hotel}, is that a good area?'"
Anyway, the pressure was too much even for Good Part of Town, and a message went up on the site soon after: "This site is gone. It's not worth the trouble."
But, as of this morning, a new message appeared.
"We're revamping the site to make it even better. Please check back soon!" And even added this video:
There you have it. Gather the forces, Internet. Time to send this beast back to where it came from.
[via Gawker]
