After posting a review on Tripadvisor which accounts for my 224th contributions, I received the following email:
“Action Requested on your Review for Jamaica Me Crazy
Our travel community appreciates you wanting to share your experience with them.
We need you to make some changes and resubmit your review to comply with our guidelines.”
As much as I trust the fairness of my writing, I still went back to re-read the article, and for the life of me, I could not find anything discriminating in it. I first thought that maybe the word ‘crazy’ is the issue here, until my wife’s speculation zoned in on the word “white man”.
“Hmm, could it be…naw, that would be hilarious, stupid and crazy…there it is again, that word, crazy; I don’t know.”
I really don’t know. Can we not say “white man” or “crazy” anymore without someone feeling hurt or offended? I mean, how do I expect people to describe me? After all, I am black. And if I went looking for Chinese cuisine at an establishment titled Wong Fo Woo with the subtitle ‘Authentic Chinese Foods’, the last thing I’d be expecting is a staff of black people, and moreover if the staff were Asian and the apparent manager was black; trust me, I’d be writing a review in a heartbeat to highlight the disappointment and fascination.
Nonetheless, I replied as follow:
Dear Tripadvisor,
After reviewing your guidelines, we found nothing that satisfied your “discrimination” rules. Our submission is a “review” and by definition this can be a praise or a criticism. The name of the establishment contains the word “crazy” to no fault of anyone but the owner, therefore, we have failed to see any error or provocations in the submission.
If you wish for us to no longer use the platform, simply say so, and not play technical word games; we’ve been submitting for years, why is there a problem now? This world has become too sensitive, we cannot express truth anymore. “Is there somewhere to add a review about Tripadvisor on your platform?”
Sincerely,.
Unfortunately, the people behind TripAdvisor are cowards, in which you cannot contact them directly by email, thus, you are reading and replying to emails from a machine fuelled by algorithm etc.
Thankfully, there’s WordPress, and if all fails, there’s my personal website, and if that fails too, there’s still my voice.
© Ian T. Sebàs 2023
Bleeding Pen 