For now, I’ll just post here with several examples and tag @well-being … and please leave it here – it’s useful to have this in the public thread discussing Black participation.
For people not mentioned here, please consider this a mini-tutorial for the kinds of things to recognize and respond to, either by calling in or calling out or letting the @well-being team know.
And I don’t think any of these were intentional – like I say in 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
Especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen anti-Blackness from somebody and it seems like it was unintentional, very often a polite call in as a reply or direct message is a good option. Impact > intent, so a mistake can still cause harm even if it’s not intentional, but it’s more likely to be a good learning opportunity. Let them know they’ve said something unfortunate, explain why, and possibly follow up with them one-on-one or in a small group. For more on this tactic, see Harvard Diversity Inclusion and Belonging’s Calling In and Calling Out Guide and Loretta Ross’ Don’t Call People Out, Call Them In video and book Calling In.
EDIT: it really is very easy to unintentionally say problematic things when talking about these kinds of issues, so I apologize if I’ve done that here and in other posts … if so, please feel free to call me in (or out if you think it’ll be more effective)
The rest of this thread has examples of call-outs and call-ins.
To start with, here’s the details on the example I mentioned earlier:
WTF. Earlier I had gone the polite call-in route.
as Ernie Smith has pointed out, "Eternal November” is gatekeeping, and dismissing the opinions of Black people who checked out the Fediverse in November 2022 and either left because of its racism – or stayed despite the racism racism and are working to improve it – is not only gatekeeping but racist. So please don’t do that.
Strypey went ahead and did that anyhow. Oh well. Call-ins don’t always work.
In a reply @hamishcampbell pointed out that the terms are inside baseball, which is true and relates to my point about how it’s easy to say something unfortunate by mistake. Do we misremember Eternal September?Kevin Driscoll / University of virginia – Flow is a good discussion of Eternal September as it relates to the Twitter influx to Mastodon in 2022 (it links off to the Ernie Smith article I mentioned). A key point here is that many of the people coming from Twitter were Black and brown, and a lot the language that was used talking about them was racialized and used anti-immigrant tropes. So “Eternal November” echoes that.
None of that’s general knowledge, so my first response to Strypey was a call-in: a short description of the problem, and a polite request that he please stopped using the language. But he didn’t.
Also in that thread (and this is intended as a call-in!)
OK, Hamish doesn’t think it’s as central of an issue, but BIPOC people may well have a different view. He’s presenting his opinion that “the racism is less important in this context” as a fact – and isn’t including any BIPOC perspectives, so it gives them impression that he thinks they don’t matter. Also, he’s telling Black people (and anybody else) who’s not a techno-libertarian guy that they should hold their nose and put up with it.
This is also an example of where flagging (as implemented by Discourse) isnt a great solution. Hamish said a lot of other stuff in the thread, there’s no reason to hide it just because he used some unfortunate wording here.
(Of course in really blatant cases where somebody’s used the n-word or called queer people deviants, then hiding it can make sense (especially if that’s the only thing in the post) to reduce the harm to others who see the thread, but I haven’t seen any examples of the really blatant stuff during my time on SocialHub.)
In this thread:
First of all there’s the “how about you explain” attitude. As Ijeoma Oluo says in Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed, “Free, individualized education is not a thing we do anymore.” Do the work yourself instead of putting the burden on somebody who (for all you know) is a person of color. Then there’s the implication that anybody who doesn’t adhere to this white view is supporting “Pravda for corporate stalinism”.
There are a lot of other examples in Strypey’s post and followups, but I’ll leave them as an exercise for the readers.
Also in this thread (and again, a call-in)
It’s a good question to ask in general, but in this context changing the subject from the absence of Black people to “an intimidated new-to-fedi non-technical admin or organizer to see on this forum” is (a) changing the subject away from the original focus on Black people and (b) implying that the Black people who aren’t here are non-techincal, are new to fedi, and intimidated. No, they’re not intimidated, they just have better things to do than deal with stuff like this!
EDIT: another reply in this thread, after I made this post, is another even clearer example of changing the subject away from increasing Black participation here to increasing participation from other communities . So I did another polite call-in, suggesting it get moved to another thread. It’s a community that would be great to have more participation from, so a good suggestion in general, but not great in the context of this thread.
And also from the same comment, Bumblefudge’s question Are white latinos and puerto ricans “non-white” for these purposes? illustrates how complex this all is. There’s no way to know who this is referring to – maybe Bumblefudge is a white, latino and/or puerto rican and hinting at something important to his perspective, maybe it’s a reference to Jason, maybe it’s something else completely.
And different people might well have different answers to that very interesting question, which relates to the interactions between racism, ethnicity, colonialism, and colorism (which cuts in both directions)… And there are similar questions in other situations. Are Ashkenazi Jews with eastern european and russian heritage (like me, for example) white? I certainly see myself as white; other Ashkenazi Jews don’t see themselves that way; white supremacists sure as heck don’t see us as white.
In any case it’s a good reminder not to erase the existence of people who aren’t so easy to categorize. In one of my posts I was talking about apparent tensions between Black people and white trans women, and how Black trans people are invisibilized … somebody who read an early draft said “what about trans people who aren’t either Black or white?” Sure enough I had invisibilized them. It wasn’t bad intent on my part, but impact > intent … so I revised the post and try to keep it in mind going forward.
(And also that’s why my original topic in this post was specifically focused on Black people, and I phrased it as “almost complete” absence. There are in fact Black people in these forums – and elsewhere on the fediverse, it’s important not to erase them! And there are other people of color here as well, who are also marginalized in various ways, so it’s important not to erase them as well.)