4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
Draft! Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Feedback welcome! Here's the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
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see: "i think if you can only racialize this verbiage when you hear it that’s weirdness on your part." and again i think this very much people wanting to die on an unimportant hill that they can feel sanctimonious/virtue-signally about and scold people about instead of tackling actual manifestations of racism in the tech field.
i cannot stress this enough: if people want to address something that materially affects black people and other minorities in tech, that should probably start with the omnipresent discriminatory hiring practices and normalized racism--not terminology that requires racialization to be problematic. (and it should probably start with not checking actual black people's opinions on this subject like they're the reason any of this is a problem!)
actual black people's opinions
But I'm black too though and I don't remember voting for you as our representative. Which is to say, yes, there's certainly other things we can do to tackle racism, but tackling ground level stuff like inherently painting black as bad and/or negative is part of that. You're free to disagree, but so would Candace Owens, so being black means nothing when you're on the wrong side of the issue.
there’s certainly other things we can do to tackle racism, but tackling ground level stuff like inherently painting black as bad and/or negative is part of that.
i simply do not think that this is racist or worth caring about unless you make it (at which point i would argue yet again the problem is internalized, not with the phrasing used), and i think this is reflected in how the overwhelming majority of people who care about this are white people who want to feel good about themselves without doing anything that would actually tackle racism at the source or challenge their whiteness and how they might benefit from it. to me "whitelist/blacklist" is extremely representative of contemporary slacktivism--stuff that feels good but is functionally a red herring toward material progress on these issues. (notice, for instance, how much time we're wasting on even debating if this is valuable when we could be doing anything else. and how we're doing this in a thread where some people are just unambiguously being racist.)
If it is not that important to you but to someone else to feel better, it would be in the spirit of the instance to change the terminology, wouldn't it?
You're exemplifying OP's #1 and #2: a black person, who's in a position to know what people will/won't take offence with (since she's a mod), is using the terms whitelist/blacklist, and telling you "it's fine".
But you're still trying to argue it on hypothetical grounds? Shut up and listen to her dammit.
She must be a god not a mod to know what all people take offence with, so what kind of argument is that supposed to be?
And I am allowed to express my opinion, with I did in a civilized manner. So you can take your "Shut up and listen to her dammit.", shove it up your ass and fuck off.
Nobody here is omniscient nor implied to, it's just that she's in a considerably better position to know what should be offensive than either of us, as both part of the relevant community (black people) and someone dealing with people all the time.
And I am allowed to express my opinion, with I did in a civilized manner. So you can take your “Shut up and listen to her dammit.”, shove it up your ass and fuck off.
I could turn your argument against you and say that, just like you feel entitled to express your "excuuuse me black people, you might be ignorant on what other black people should feel offended with, so let me drag down this discussion with this cacophony of hypotheticals", I'm also allowed to express my own.
I won't though - go read the text in the OP and you'll notice why I chose those specific words, even if they sound rude. You guys want to talk, talk, talk, but when black people talk you don't listen? In fact I already said too much.