Sun readers respond to non-white suspect, as only they can:
“check the conveninces store”
“Maybe he knows “KARATE” Shing co tute leeeee, HOYAAAAAA. he touch finger on neck, you fall like bamboo to ground. HOOYAAAAAA”
“OMG! It’s JET LI!!!!!!!!”
“Looks like 80% of the population in T .O”
“Tanned Skin? That ‘tan’ must be that cheap stuff in a bottle because he sure looks YELLOW to me. Call it what it is you politically correct numbskulls.”
UPDATE: Even more…
“so nipper running around raping girls and you are worried about spelling ! did i spell this right AS#HOLE ”
“Deport this chink when he gets caught.”
“deport this fish head”
“check the fake apple stores”
“Jackie Chan? Isn’t that you? Why Jackie, why? You could’ve had any bitches you want!!!”
Now, policing a comments trench can be like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole. And it’s time consuming. Though most news organizations use filters to screen out clearly offensive language, ugly stuff makes it onto the comments pages every day — even at my paper. Usually, however, an editor twigs to it in short order or is alerted by a reader and yanks it down.
But in this case — and the other involving the shooting at the Caribbean festival — clearly racist remarks have been allowed to stand on the Sun pages for hours or longer. (As of this update, at 11:19 p.m, none of these remarks I spotted on the Sun site at 12:44 p.m. had been removed.)
And when someone makes these kind of remarks on a Citizen or Globe and Mail blog, they are quickly and emphatically denounced for their stupidity by others. There’s an encouraging trickle of this among Sun comments, but not much, and those that object are sometimes met with equally stupid taunts back.