Blacklist
Encyclopedia
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle. Conversely, a whitelist is a list or compilation identifying entities that are accepted, recognized, or privileged.

History

According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word "blacklist" originated with a list England's King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in 1649. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, thirteen of these regicides were executed and twenty-five sentenced to life imprisonment, while others escaped.

They also point out that "white list" is not the opposite of a blacklist, but rather a list, often kept by unions, of people suitable for employment. Refers to the "white-list".

Employment context

Blacklisting can be formal or informal. In the employment setting, applicants who apply to numerous positions regardless of being qualified or not can soon be ignored during some or all subsequent applicant processes. This can be an informal choice made by one HR
Human resource management
Human Resource Management is the management of an organization's employees. While human resource management is sometimes referred to as a "soft" management skill, effective practice within an organization requires a strategic focus to ensure that people resources can facilitate the achievement of...

 professional, or a shared formal response taken up by the entire office.

In the past, lists of union members have been shared or circulated between multiple organizations to prevent hiring of employees who have been critical of management or advocated on behalf of members of their profession. In Canada, CLAC
Christian Labour Association of Canada
The Christian Labour Association of Canada is a labour union which represents workers in the construction, health care and food industries. The association was established in 1952 to represent workers on the basis of "Christian social principles"...

 operates such a blacklist.

Political context

The term blacklisting is generally used in a pejorative context, as it implies that someone has been prevented from having legitimate access due to the whims or judgments of another. For example, a person being served with a restraining order
Restraining order
A restraining order or order of protection is a form of legal injunction that requires a party to do, or to refrain from doing, certain acts. A party that refuses to comply with an order faces criminal or civil penalties and may have to pay damages or accept sanctions...

 for having threatened another person would not be considered a case of blacklisting. However, somebody who is fired for exposing poor working conditions in a particular company, and is subsequently blocked from finding work in that industry, may be considered to have been blacklisted. Blacklisting can and has been accomplished informally and by consensus of authority figures, and does not necessarily require a physical list or overt written record.

Hollywood blacklist

In American history, one of the most famous examples of blacklisting stemmed from an investigation launched in 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...

 (HUAC) into Communist influence on the motion picture industry. The first in the industry to be blacklisted, as a result of their refusal to provide evidence to HUAC, were a group known as the Hollywood Ten, most of them screenwriters, who had at one time or another been members of the American Communist Party
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

. Today, the best known of the Hollywood Ten are the writers Ring Lardner, Jr. and Dalton Trumbo
Dalton Trumbo
James Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter and novelist, and one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry...

, who was barred from openly working in Hollywood
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 for over a dozen years as a result of his defiance of HUAC. (He continued to work under pseudonyms and "fronts" until the revelation in 1960 that he had written the script for Spartacus
Spartacus (film)
Spartacus is a 1960 American epic historical drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel of the same name by Howard Fast...

.) Actor John Garfield
John Garfield
John Garfield was an American actor adept at playing brooding, rebellious, working-class character roles. He grew up in poverty in Depression-era New York City and in the early 1930s became an important member of the Group Theater. In 1937 he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner...

 was one of the more famous Hollywood performers to have been blacklisted by major American film studios as a direct result of HUAC investigations and hearings.

Blacklisting sometimes consisted of guilt by association
Guilt by Association
Guilt by Association can refer to:* Association fallacy - sometimes called "guilt by association".* Guilt by Association Vol. 1 - album by Engine Room Recordings.* Guilt by Association Vol. 2 - album by Engine Room Recordings....

, as in the case of radio actress Madeline Lee
Madeline Lee Gilford
Madeline Lee Gilford was an American film and stage actress and social activist, who later enjoyed a career as a theatrical producer. Gilford was the widow of actor Jack Gilford, whom she married in 1949...

. Both Lee and her husband, actor Jack Gilford
Jack Gilford
Jack Gilford was an American actor on Broadway, films and television.-Early life:Gilford was born Jacob Aaron Gellman on the lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, and grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

, were blacklisted after it was revealed that Lee had given a party in her house to raise funds for a group later labeled as a Communist front
Communist front
A Communist front organization is an organization identified to be a front organization under the effective control of a Communist party, the Communist International or other Communist organizations. Lenin originated the idea in his manifesto of 1902, "What Is to Be Done?"...

. Though there was no suspicion that she had ever been involved in any putatively "subversive" political causes (and though her real name was spelled differently), Lee became the target of thousands of protest phone calls to her network. Another actress, Camila Ashland
Camila Ashland
Camila Ashland , is an actress, best known for her role as Minnie Du Val in the cult series Dark Shadows.Ashland also starred on the soap opera General Hospital as Alice Grant from 1976–1977, and in the 1983 hit NBC miniseries V and its 1984 sequel, V: The Final Battle where she played Resistance...

, who appeared on the television show Danger, physically resembled Madeline Lee; though she had no political past, her network too became the target of protest phone calls. Madeline Pierce, a 20-year veteran of radio, who again had no political past, was also ultimately blacklisted.

California Proposition 8 supporter blacklist

Following the passage of California's Proposition 8
California Proposition 8 (2008)
Proposition 8 was a ballot proposition and constitutional amendment passed in the November 2008 state elections...

, Proposition 8 opponents obtained donation lists of those who had supported the ballot measure by contributing to the "Yes on 8" campaign, published the list, organized an activism group, and began calling for boycott
Boycott
A boycott is an act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for political reasons...

s of the places of work of the supporters to force the firing or resignation of employees. Chad Griffin, a political adviser to Hollywood executives and same-sex marriage supporter explained the intent of the campaign by saying, "Any individual who has held homophobic views and who has gone public by writing a check, you can expect to be publicly judged. Many can expect to pay a price for a long time to come."
There has been controversy as to whether this is appropriate response to the passage of Proposition 8 on the part of those opposed to it.

Blacklisting of trade union members

Trade union members in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 have been blacklisted by employers using the services of the Economic League (UK)
Economic League (UK)
The Economic League was an organisation in the United Kingdom dedicated to opposing what they saw as subversion and action against free enterprise....

which operated between 1918 and 1993, and The Consulting Association
Consulting Association
The Consulting Association was an organisation in the United Kingdom which maintained an illegal blacklist of construction workers who were active trade union members, or were otherwise vocal on matters such as health and safety in their industry....

 which took over this role until it was closed down in February 2009.

Blacklisting was used in Norway before the Second World War. Well-known blacklisted trade unionists include Thorolf Bugge
Thorolf Bugge
Thorolf Bugge was a Norwegian trade unionist and politician for the Labour and Communist parties.He was born in Heddal as a son of district physician Johan Carl Bugge and Christine Theodora Drolsum . He was a grandson of Ulrik Bugge. He had middle school education, and also studied at Bergen...

.

Real estate appraisers

On October 16, 2008, Capitol West Appraisers filed a class action lawsuit against Countrywide Financial Corp. (now owned by Bank of America) alleging Countrywide blacklisted appraisers who refused to appraise real estate at inflated prices.

In Capitol West v. Countrywide Financial Corp., Capitol West Appraisals alleges Countrywide pressured appraisers to set the value of a property at the selling price rather than setting the value based on an inspection of the property and comparable market prices in the area as required by appraisal standards. Misrepresenting the value of a property allowed Countrywide to lend more money to more buyers at higher risks with less collateral. Countrywide could then make more money off the loans by selling them on secondary markets as mortgage backed securities.

Appraisers who refused to misrepresent property values were put in a "do not use" or "Field Review List" data base, in essence a blacklist. When an appraisal was submitted by an appraiser on the "do not use" database it was flagged for "field review". A field review is a review of the original appraisal. All field reviews were conducted by Landsafe, a subsidiary of Counrtywide, who would consistently shoot holes in any appraisal from a blacklisted appraiser. Mortgage Brokers were then required to get a second appraisal from another appraiser. Since independent mortgage brokers did not want to pay for two appraisals and did not know which lender they would ultimately use, and since Countrywide was the biggest home mortgage lender in the U.S., brokers simply would not use anyone on the Field Review List.

As of Aug. 28, 2008, more than 2,000 names were on the Field Review List, Countrywide's blacklist, which it sends to mortgage brokers who hire appraisers across the United States.

Retail

In the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, a private agency known as The Retail Exchange blacklists those who make excessive returns
Returning
In retail, returning is the process of a customer taking previously purchased merchandise back to the retailer, and in turn, receiving a cash refund, exchange for another item , or a store credit...

 to participating retailers.

Screenwriting

An annual list of Hollywood's most-liked, but unproduced, screenplays is published on the second Friday of December each year. The Black List began in 2004 as a survey with contributions from 75 film studio and production company executives. In 2009, over 300 executives contributed their opinion.

Since its inception, dozens of screenplays that appeared on the list have been optioned, produced, and released, many to great commercial success. Two of the top three screenplays on the inaugural 2005 list - Juno
Juno (film)
Juno is a 2007 comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Ellen Page stars as the title character, an independent-minded teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent events that put pressures of adult life onto her. Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby, J. K....

 by Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody
Brook Busey , better known by the pen name Diablo Cody, is an American screenwriter, writer, blogger, journalist, and author. She was first known for her candid chronicling of her year as a stripper in her Pussy Ranch blog and her 2006 memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper...

, and Lars and the Real Girl
Lars and the Real Girl
Lars and the Real Girl is a 2007 American-Canadian comedy-drama film written by Nancy Oliver and directed by Craig Gillespie. It stars Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner and Patricia Clarkson...

 by Nancy Oliver - went on to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 2008 Academy Awards
2008 Academy Awards
2008 Academy Awards may refer to:* 80th Academy Awards, the Academy Awards ceremony which took place in 2008* 81st Academy Awards, the 2009 ceremony honoring the best in film for 2008...

, with Juno winning the Oscar.

Membership of The Black List is by invitation only.

Copies of the annual lists are available from The Black List website.

Credit card merchants

Companies which have a merchant account terminated, and their directors, are added to a list called TMF/MATCH. This results in an almost certain automatic denial of new merchant account applications by almost all US companies offering merchant accounts.

Computing

In computing, a blacklist is an access control
Access control
Access control refers to exerting control over who can interact with a resource. Often but not always, this involves an authority, who does the controlling. The resource can be a given building, group of buildings, or computer-based information system...

 system which denies entry to a specific list (or a defined range) of users, programs, or network addresses.

Medical context

Blacklisting is multiple providers denying care to a certain patient
Patient
A patient is any recipient of healthcare services. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, advanced practice registered nurse, veterinarian, or other health care provider....

 or patients with a connotation of volition or willfulness. It is done in various ways for various reasons and is not new. In 1907 the Transvaal Medical Union in South Africa blacklisted patients if they could not pay cash in advance. That was a physical list kept by the community of physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

s. A physical list is not necessary to blacklist patients, but there have been other efforts to do that. For instance, in the United States the web site was set up to blacklist any patient who had filed a suit against a physician. That effort was extended off shore to a website that encourages doctors to consider avoiding patients who are listed in their database. Those both are physical lists that blacklist patients who either have complained or sued their healthcare providers.

There are less formal and less visible blacklists as well. For instance, an organization called "Sufferers of Iatrogenic Neglect" knows of 40 cases where patients claim they have suffered on two counts: one, from the original human medical error, and two, because they complained about it and as a result got blacklisted. In West London, Rafat Saeed had difficulty finding a GP and says, “… it is very easy for a doctor to blacklist a patient through the Family Health Services Authority”.
Angelique Omega wrote in her blog, "I was once told in a phone call by a Renown E.R. nurse, after she very quickly looked up my name in their computer, that I'd better not ever show my face there ever again. This was after I had filed complaints …"

One patient created a graph showing that every time his primary care physician
Primary care physician
A primary care physician, or PCP, is a physician/medical doctor who provides both the first contact for a person with an undiagnosed health concern as well as continuing care of varied medical conditions, not limited by cause, organ system, or diagnosis....

 knew about appointments he had with other physicians, those appointments did not result in diagnosis or treatment. All those physicians pretended to be helping, but eventually workers in one physician's office let him know that his primary care physician called them and told them not to diagnose or treat his injuries. They were protecting the physician who caused the injuries.

Data sharing also can cause patients to become blacklisted. Data sharing makes it easy to get labeled as a "problem patient" without anyone adding a name to a list. Repeat patients who are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, or patients with chronic conditions or mental illness, can get labeled as "problem patients" in computer systems that hold the records of patients and can make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to get appointments for care. Such systems have no borders making this a global problem.

Even without data sharing, collegial loyalty, watching each other's backs, can be enough to result in the denial of care to certain patients. Consider the patient who has been injured by a healthcare provider. Patients with iatrogenic illnesses
Iatrogenesis
Iatrogenesis, or an iatrogenic artifact is an inadvertent adverse effect or complication resulting from medical treatment or advice, including that of psychologists, therapists, pharmacists, nurses, physicians and dentists...

 often cannot get a record made of their injuries and often cannot get treatment. Trudy Newman in her article "Deadly Medical Practices" described the cause as being physicians having a stronger allegiance to each other than to their patients. They are reluctant to acknowledge the existence of iatrogenic injuries by diagnosing or treating them. A patient with iatrogenic injuries can go from doctor to doctor to doctor without getting diagnosed or treated and never know why. Without a list or any communication between physicians, collegial loyalty by itself results in patients with certain kinds of problems being blacklisted.

However, the term blacklist does connote volition or willfulness. A new and unrecognized disease resulting in patients being unable to find treatment might not be considered blacklisting unless inclination or personal belief or the equivalent had to do with why treatment either was not found or was unreasonably difficult to find.

In the UK the term blacklisted also is used in the NHS
National Health Service
The National Health Service is the shared name of three of the four publicly funded healthcare systems in the United Kingdom. They provide a comprehensive range of health services, the vast majority of which are free at the point of use to residents of the United Kingdom...

 to denote blacklisted medicines
Blacklisted (medicine)
In the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, the Blacklist is a list published in Part XVIIIA of the NHS Drug Tariff denoting medicines and/or specific brands of medicines that cannot be prescribed on NHS medical prescriptions...

 that are not allowed to be prescribed on NHS prescriptions.

See also

  • Banned Books
  • Black Book (gaming)
    Black Book (gaming)
    "Black Book" is the nickname frequently used to refer to a list of persons who are unwelcome in casinos. The name comes from the fact that the persons listed in the "book" are essentially "blacklisted"...

  • Media transparency
    Media transparency
    Media transparency is the concept of determining how and why information is conveyed through various means.As used in the humanities,the topic of media transparency implies openness and accountability...

  • Online chat
    Online chat
    Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...


Further reading

  • James J. Lorence. The Suppression of Salt of the Earth. How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America. University of New Mexico Press: 1999. ISBN 0-8263-2027-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-8263-2028-7 (paper)


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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