IS YOUR FAVORITE COMPUTER PROGRAM RACIST? Texas programmer sues former employer over offensive code. When Willa Jackson started working the night shift at Integrated Systech in Austin, Texas, she felt she was entering a world filled with opportunity. Jackson had just completed three years of intensive course work in computer programming at a local community college and, at the age of 47, had recently been hired by the successful software developer. Her night-shift position at IS was to be Jackson's first non-minimum wage job. But that optimism soon turned to shame and then anger as Jackson discovered that many of her colleagues at IS were accustomed to making racist jokes in the office. In fact, the epithets were never actually uttered in Jackson's presence, they were encoded within the dozens of software applications being developed at IS. Her painful discovery occurred less than one month after she began working as an entry-level programming assistant. It was Jackson's responsibility to find bugs in sections of code that other, higher-level IS programmers produced during the day. But when Jackson -- an African-American woman who hopes to one day launch her own software startup -- began to dig deeper into a faulty section of source code she was mortified by what she found. Programmers at the company had been using racist monikers and explicit sexual language in the variables used by their programs to sort information. In one instance, a program had been instructed to "fetch watermelons" and "somefriedchicken" when handling a certain procedure. The handler had even been dubbed "pickaninny" and was only one of several dozen like sequences embedded in IS programs designed for home and office use. When Jackson showed the racist code to her supervisor she was assured that IS would act decisively to reprimand and possibly even dismiss the offending employee. But as weeks passed and no one approached Jackson with a follow-up to her complaint, she began to suspect that no disciplinary action would be forthcoming. At that point, Jackson began to pore over the mountains of used code that IS had stockpiled over the past six years. Much to her dismay, Jackson discovered derogatory and occasionally violent terms inside the programming language used by almost all IS software programs. "It went all the way back to the first version of ISDisk," explains an incredulous Jackson, "and they never bothered to hide it." Shortly after she had printed out over a thousand pages of tainted code, Jackson hired an attorney and filed a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the profitable software firm. Just who is responsible for the recurring use of discriminatory language in the company's computer code is still a mystery. IS executives have issued several public apologies since the lawsuit began, but they have yet to cooperate with the investigation into its allegedly hostile work environment. In 1996, Texaco paid out $140 million to resolve a similar lawsuit brought by its minority employees. But labor law experts speculate that the IS case may never be resolved due to the unprecedented circumstances of the alleged misconduct. "No jury in this state will believe that the code Jackson found is speech," argues Mitch Shapson, an attorney with the labor relations firm of Stennis, Shapson & Velasquez. "Even if they did think the messages hidden inside the programs were offensive," continues Shapson, "it would be like trying an auto manufacturer for putting a Swastika-shaped part in your car's engine." Jackson, who is now working as a full-time programmer at Dell Computers in San Antonio, is not willing to give up her fight against IS despite the slim chances of a legal victory. "At this point, I'm not interested in the money," claims an unbowed Jackson, "I only want the public to think twice about the kinds of hateful messages that may be hidden inside the software they use everyday."