6mo ago

5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people

privacy.thenexus.today 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people

Anti-Blackness is a long-term problem in the fediverse. Now's a good time to start changing that.

Here's the list:

Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices
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
Approach it intersectionally

The full article goes into detail, and also has links to anti-racism resources and appendices with a list of common mistakes to avoid and blocklist resources for moderators.

Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on earlier drafts!

The Nexus of Privacy @lemmy.blahaj.zone

6mo ago

5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people

privacy.thenexus.today /start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/

9 0

46 comments

- a goddamn masterpiece

Post less – and think before you post
I support y'all, but I'm definitely not doing this. Instead, I encourage black folks to shit post more. Together we can make the internet a better place.
- The nice thing about the a platform like Lemmy is that unlike in real life, we can all speak at the same time. And the very last thing Lemmy needs is less content.
  So yeah, post more, this is dumb advice. The other points are OK though.
- “post more pointless bullshit with less thought and also racism on the fediverse can be solved if Black people shitpost more” is an entire fuck of a take, but it tells me everything I need to know about whether or not you should be posting here
  
  racism on the fediverse can be solved if Black people shitpost more
  This indeed makes no sense. Exactly as much sense as the implication that white people posting less solves racism somehow. The article explains that that rule should be "if you're white, post less on topics about race and if you do want to post, think about what you're about to say".
  In conclusion: shitposting remains a free for all.
  
  Yeesh, this escaped containment quickly, didn't it?
  Thanks for keeping our bar nazi-free!
- wow are you the real dr. albert wesker :o

you arent doing anyone any favors by calling point 2 just "post less" when the actual point of the article is: if you are white, post less about race, and think more before you post
- that doesn’t seem like a particularly good representation of the actual point of the article to me. here’s the article author’s own summary of point 2:
  Of course, the combination of deciding not to post in some circumstances, and taking more time to think and work on the wording of the posts you do make, means that you'll post less ... but that's not a bad thing. The posts you make will be higher quality, and are likely to lead to better discussions. And, posting less also opens up space for you to amplify more Black voices.
  
  Thanks for pointing that out! But, I got enough pushback on the wording of point 2 that I changed it to just "Think before you post"
- Point 1 is suspect too. Black people have no incentive to let people know they're black on the fediverse.
  
  this libertarian-flavored version of “there’s no racism on the fediverse because I haven’t noticed any” is somehow even stupider
  
  Neat, a double strange loop of a bad take!
  Poster considers "Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices" a suspect point, and failing to listen further, misinterprets the advice and makes a non sequitur counterpoint.
  Poster implies qualms with point "Post less – and think before you post" as well, and accordingly posts without thinking much at all.
  That's some self-consistent jackassery right there.

FYI: I'm posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for "big brain tech dude" authors who are posting "yet another clueless take."
While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a "clueless take," I think it's clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don't like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one's beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I'm not going to take that angle. I don't think it's okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.
With that all in mind, I think that it's worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can't permalink because Lemmy is trash; it's in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub's architects, I got the sense that they didn't understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.
(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined "The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery". This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It's all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system's structure!)
Further, it's not clear that the community's adaptations are sustainable. TBS can't seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren't private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don't want to let them police your lands.
- The inscrutable NSFW rule you seem to be such a stickler for for some equally inscrutable reason has been repealed! Go in peace.
- Holy shit the person who replied to you has this in their post history:
  Some YouTube channels for children are uploading obscene videos.
  According to the article, the videos feature nudity and possibly sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is unfortunately a fact of life, and it’s probably better that children recognise it, and see it condemned in the media they watch, than not know what it is at all. And you would have to be a puritan to think that children seeing naked people is somehow so terrible.
  Along with sealioning and a bunch of AI (like him being so excited about that recent deep fake stuff). In the last few days I've seen a lot of racist and transphobe shit on lemmy, despite having blocked quite a few people over my stay and comment sections being barren as a result
  
  when we get a super bad take on an awful.systems sub, we tend to check their comment history in case they're just having a bad moment. you will be unsurprised to hear that when it's a bad take on race, it's generally certain we rapidly find reason to ban them from the sub instantly.
- Thanks much for the detailed response ... I didn't realize the purpose of this community. Somebody had suggested I post the draft here, which I did, and now I realize that their suggestion was a snarky trap that I fell for 🤣. Oh well, joke's on them (as well as me), I got good feedback on the draft here.
  Agreed that there are structural problems with AP; I wrote about this in And it's about the protocol, too. But even though software improvements can help, the underlying problem's cultural.
  I intentionally didn't phrase it in terms of allyship (in fact I'm pretty sure the word "ally" doesn't even appear in the article) ... still, I don't think white folks (me included) can stop being white, nor should we -- we are who we are, and that's okay. I do think we (again including me) can make more of an effort to deal with our default attitudes and behaviors, and try to use our privilege for good.
  
  posting here did attract a lot of worked examples of why we need this of course
- I don't think it's okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.
  Sorry, what? Race isn't something you can change, and nor is it something you should feel ashamed about/be discriminated against
  
  Biologically, race isn't a coherent ontological classification; you're thinking of ethnicity/culture and heritage. Whiteness isn't a biological classification, but a belief system. Incidentally, part of whiteness is the belief that races exist and are meaningful classifiers, along with the belief that whiteness is worth defending, leading to white defensiveness, also called white fragility.
  If you still insist, then here's a speedrun: are they white? Why or why not? The Ainu, the Inuit, Michael Jackson, the Scottish, the Irish, the Italians, etc. Whiteness is one of what George Carlin called "big clubs;" they are defined primarily by power-sharing agreements between political power brokers rather than by scientific evidence. The power of whiteness has been extended in various ways even as science has shown that it is bullshit.
  Also, on a personal note, I'm routinely discriminated against because of the color of my skin, along with other physical properties. I don't deny that this happens to me or others, nor do I deny that it is a large part of our society (or at least the USA.) I merely opine that this discrimination is undesirable, unmoored from scientific evidence, and something that we should work to eliminate. I'm not pulling one of those stupid "colorblind" routines.
  
  are you sure that you understand the context and meaning of what you just quote-replied on?
  
  There is no such thing as biological race. Race is a purely social construction. People are "white", not because of some imaginary gene or imaginary scientific classification, but because their skin is pale enough to be socially privileged.
  So, while it's true that "white people" can never stop being "white" in the sense of social privilege, it is absolutely possible for pale skinned people to recognize that "whiteness" is a phony racist category and thus to disassociate and dis-identify with this completely unjust and irrational system.
  The alternative that you're promoting is "race realism" which is discredited fascist/rascist pseudo-science.

happy to see the draft get fleshed out. good writeup

I think OP might have a stalker, this level of attention from weird nerds is bizarre.

As someone who is not a US citizen, I can't understand what it's all about. How could someone tell the color of the person who is participating? For me, everybody is just the same, and I can only judge them for what they're saying, not who they are.
Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices;
Isn't it already done independently of the skin color of the person?
Post less – and think before you post
I can only guess this point is lacking context.
Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
I can't say I have seen it, and I believe it happens a lot, so I guess people are reporting. That's the better point of the list!
Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
If the message is good and promotes equality, normal people gravitate to it. Racist people will not care regardless of this text.
Approach it intersectionally
What?
- there’s an entire article attached you didn’t read before you decided to post this pointless nonsense, and the link’s right after the parts you quoted
  
  what, you mean we have to read things before we spew opinions about them? what an utterly odious requirement! admins! help! I am being oppressed!
  ((......oh god I hope this joke is helped to land by dint of domain.....))

- I'm white and I don't pretend to speak for black people, nor do I presume to dictate what sort of content they post in other fora, but given that pretending to be black online is a time-honored tradition of racists shits, this kind of stuff is ... concerning: https://aussie.zone/post/3617992