The Southern California groups, which scheduled a rally and news conference Friday, say eBay is violating its own policy that discourages sellers from listing items that promote racial intolerance.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson of the National Alliance for Positive Action said eBay has not responded to fax and e-mail complaints from his group about listings that include a racial slur.
"When African-Americans look at this and say it's offensive, why is there no response?" said Hutchinson, president of the Inglewood, Calif.-based racial and social justice public advocacy group. "It just shows there's contempt for the wishes and desires of African-Americans."
EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said he's unaware of the alliance's efforts to reach the company. EBay removes listings using words in ways that are "abusive or offensive or degrading or in any way disparaging," Pursglove said.
But it doesn't strike listings that use such words to describe items. For example, some book or album titles use a racial slur in their titles, Pursglove said.
"What we've always tried to do is strike a balance between the sensitivities of eBay users with the desire of eBay users to buy and sell merchandise," he said.
But Hutchinson and others say it's especially painful to find listings for books, prints, card games, antique glass sets, tobacco tins and other items that use a racial slur and are sometimes described as "cute" or "adorable."
Dante Lee, president of Long Beach, Calif.-based A.S.J. Media, which owns BlackNews.com, said when the n-word is typed in, "you see items that portray blacks" with a "pitch dark skin tone, exaggerated nose flares, almost as if they look like animals. I felt offended."
In May 2001, eBay began banning the sale of artifacts from Nazi Germany, the Ku Klux Klan and notorious criminals, in hopes of avoiding legal problems in other countries. More recently, it deleted listings for items billed as debris from the space shuttle Columbia.
EBay's offensive material policy states the company will "judiciously disallow listings or items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or racial intolerance, or items that promote organizations (such as the KKK, Nazis, neo-Nazis, and Aryan Nation) with such views."
David Pilgrim estimates he has bought about 1,000 racist collectibles on eBay for the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia located on the Ferris State University campus in Big Rapids, Mich. The museum displays about 4,000 items and has about 3,000 more in storage.
The market for memorabilia depicting black people has undergone a resurgence in the last few years due to eBay, Yahoo and other Internet auction houses, said Pilgrim, curator of the museum. The items range from black baseball league jerseys to postcards depicting lynchings that can sell for up to a thousand dollars, he said.
"I hate the fact that people buy" them, said Pilgrim, who is black. But "people have the right to sell."
Lee, who planned to attend the Friday rally along with Hutchinson and other members of the Los Angeles-based National Black Anti-Defamation Association, said BlackNews.com has not called for a boycott, but may do so if eBay does not address its concerns.
"You would never walk into Wal-Mart, Kmart or any other store and see collectibles on the shelf labeled [with a racial slur]," he said. "To me this just reveals they're not conscious of the sensitivities of their ethnic audience."
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