“At the end of the day, it’s a very serious message we’re trying to get across,” Kafie said. “We’re trying to show how Senior Gift Plus and the Mahan/Terry campaign has oversimplified something as complex and hard as genocide and divestment.”

While Kafie said that the Senior Gift Plus Plus is entirely separate from the Senior Gift campaign, he said that the space to host the website had been purchased from a Senior Gift Associates Chair, Nicholas F.M. Josefowitz ’05, who is also a Crimson editor.

But Kafie said that neither Josefowitz nor any other officers of the Senior Gift campaign were involved in the planning of the website. “He sold me the webspace because I needed some, but he has no involvement,” Kafie said.

THE FARCE OFFENDS

Included in the parody site was a quotation from an email BSA Publicity Chair Nneke C. Eze ’07 sent to Kafie. Underneath, Kafie posted a response, which included a statement that Eze seemed “brainwashed,”

Eze, who is a member of the executive board of BSA, said that the quotation was lifted from a personal e-mail to Kafie asking him to take down seniorgiftplusplus.com, and that the content of her e-mail had been altered to make her writing seem ungrammatical.

And Adjah said last night that many other members of the BSA had been offended by the callous tone and remarks on the Senior Gift Plus Plus website.

In particular, Adjah said students were offended by Section 18 of the causes page, which reads: “18. Demand that the war on grade inflation is halted and reparations are paid to the student body.”

Adjah wrote in an e-mail that this section referenced both the remarks of Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, which linked grade inflation at Harvard in part to an increase in minority recruiting, and to reparation payments made to freed African-Americans after the Civil War, and was implicitly racist.

Furthermore, Adjah said that the entire website demeaned the suffering of the Darfur refugees. “Many people believed that elements of the site had a number of racist undertones as evidenced in examples such as causes #18,” Adjah wrote in an e-mail.

But Kafie said that he thought that Adjah and Eze were overanalyzing the site.

“That is utterly ridiculous. The word ‘reparations’ is a common English word used to indicate payment for a wrong,” Kafie wrote in an e-mail. “It can be and has been used in many contexts—including ours—that have nothing to do with race.”

Adjah added that he thought seniorgiftplusplus.com was insincere in its goals of supporting Darfur refugees.

“The sad truth is that if [Senior Gift Plus] did not exist, these same members would not have dedicated even a minute fraction of the amount of energy to create a site or do anything related to those black Africans dying in Darfur—parody is not a buffer for insult,” Adjah wrote in an e-mail.