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What are your thoughts on r/BlackPeopleTwitter's Country Club threads?
I think on most sites this discussion isn't even worth having, knowing the type of people it would attract. But I have faith that Tildes can maintain civil discourse on this.
For those unfamiliar, for threads on r/BPT that receive an influx of racists and trolls the mods have implemented a sort of soft-lock where only verified users are allowed to post. However, the verification process strikes me as toeing the line of what should be acceptable in an online community. Essentially it breaks down to this:
- Are you black? Give us proof of the color of your skin and you'll be verified and flaired with your race.
- Are you a "non-white POC"? You can be verified but will receive no flair.
- Are you white? Talk to the mods to receive further instructions...
I understand the rationale, but subtly race-gating threads feels icky no matter the reason.
I think there's about a thousand different good and bad ways to approach this but Lindsay Ellis' thing about cultural appropriation is coming to mind for me first and foremost here. When it comes to certain concepts, a double standard is reasonable simply because of other factors. In the video's case, it's about colonialism and power structures, but here it's about proportions, power structures, and default assumptions. Gating by race usually isn't a good thing but this may not be a bad use of it.
The fact is that reddit is very Western, white, male, and English-speaking. If people don't know anything about you, they likely assume you're probably a white male. And I'm sure this is true for the internet as a whole. All I mostly do here is overthink video games and chime in on English grammar and punctuation whenever I'm in the mood—I wouldn't be surprised if many people assume I'm a white male.
But you can't just take people at their word because instances of people pretending to be POC to spread misinformation or stoke flames of dissension are already common on other subreddits like r/unpopularopinion. It's so bad that "As a black man..." has become a meme of its own. People are now probably willing to believe I'm not a white male because of what I said in the last paragraph, even though I might just be a white male after all! I'm text on a screen, how do you know if I am or am not?
So... what else is there to do? If you want to create a cultural space based on skin colour exclusively for those POCs on a platform that's almost entirely white people, especially a platform where racebaiting, racism, and pretenders are rampant, you need to have some way to verify who is and isn't part of that target group. Yeah, it's usually not the best method but in this case, when you want to be sure that everyone commenting on BPT is actually a BP, what's a better one?
On the flipside, you have r/hiphopheads, a subreddit that at first glance looks like a black cultural ground, with many people giving long, in-depth takes about black history, culture, and music. The n-word can get tossed around quite a bit. A lot of the same slang you see on BPT is thrown about. But then look at last year's census.. Does it sit right with anyone to see what looks like a BPT sister subreddit is in fact mostly white men playing at black cultural signifiers in a way they don't do on other subreddits?
You know, you read about how jazz, rock and roll, and other artforms got co-opted in the past, but seeing it essentially in real time somewhere like r/hhh is the most surreal experience.
I don't have much to add here but I know I personally when I see numbers like this HHH survey and think "oh boooy it's all white folks", and then I look at what the makeup of the US is, it usually tempers my opinion down to "slightly more white people than you'd expect".
HHH Survey:
White: 70.5%
Hispanic: 9.9%
Black: 7.9%
South Asian: 7.7%
East Asian: 4.9%
Middle Eastern: 3%
Native American: 1%
Other: .9%
2019 U.S. Census Bureau Estimates
Non-Hispanic white: 63.4%
Hispanic and Latino (of any race): 15.3%
Black or African American: 13.4%
Asian: 5.9%
Native Americans and Alaska Natives: 1.3%
Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders: 0.2%
Two or more races: 2.7%
But are you white?? I gotta know!
I'm white, and I don't post in BPT but I do read a lot of things that get posted there. I'm not bothered by their verification, because threads that aren't country-clubbed end up full of racist people who get hundreds of upvotes. I understand your concern, but if they didn't do this the biggest space centered around black people on Reddit would end up being harassed by racist white people. The same thing happened with TwoX after it became a default sub; it ended up full of men being like "well I don't think women actually have it all that bad!" and getting lots of upvotes.
I think the idea is that black people are more likely to participate in good faith, and by requiring verification you don't get all of the people pretending to be black so they can talk about how BLM sucks. I'm not really inclined to get approved to post on country club threads, but explaining what I think white privilege means is not off-putting to me at all and if I decided I wanted to comment on BPT then I'd go do that in a heartbeat.
Edit: I want to add that the reaction would probably be different if r/whitepeopletwitter did this and mostly only let white people post, yeah. But I don't think posts there are flooded by POCs being racist against white people and if that was happening it'd be a bit different. We already know that the racist white people on reddit are really vocal; they get things on r/unpopularopinion, r/actualpublicfreakouts, r/trueoffmychest, and others upvoted to the top of r/popular regularly and they frequently flood posts on subreddits that aren't "theirs" whenever things like BLM come up. I don't think the reverse happens nearly as often, although I do feel like a couple of r/conservative threads have gotten vote-brigaded recently.
It really is a shame, because I'm sure making TwoX a default was intended to help balance out the male perspective indisputably foremost in every other sub on r/all, but instead of bringing women and female perspectives into reddit all it did was bring men into TwoX.
On the other hand, a week-old lurker could have told you that's what was going to happen, so I'm not sure why they even bothered to try.
Trying to drive growth and revenue is at the heart of pretty much every move by Reddit in the past 4-5 years.
Interestingly, I'm not sure that the intent ever was to make sure that only black people post, but rather that only black people post as black people, if you get me.
You mean in the sense of avoiding "as a black man.."?
That and edgy teens looking for n-word visas. It reminds me of the moment Dave Chappelle had when he wondered if that white guy at the show was laughing with him or at him. Anonymous redditors might not be laughing at the same things.
Oh, absolutely. The problem with big forums is that you'll never know most of the people you're interacting with and you'll never know if they're laughing with you or at you.
That's going to be a problem with any kind of minority representation (especially corporate one), they'll be represented as the minority, not as a person.
Huh? I don't understand this.
When you attempt to increase the amount of [insert minority here] in your organization, corporation, etc. you'll end up hiring people because they are part of that minority, not because they are a great fit. Please note, this often gets used as a racist dogwhistle, and I'm generally in support of such efforts, because increased representation means that the available hiring pool is more evenly mixed, coupled with the fact that a lot of minorities do not get hired even if they are a great fit, because they are a minority.
It's hard to do it right.
Hiring is hard for a lot of reasons. This seems off-topic, though, because it's not much like running an online community, where you're usually not looking for any specific skill in new members.
It definitely wasn't on-topic, but corporate diversity efforts were just the first thing that came into my mind.
Ultimately though, BPT creating the country club threads is not something I disagree with in its entirety. The sub is not serious enough (when they aren't talking about police brutality) to make the subsequent creation of an echo chamber a real issue. To me personally, it also doesn't matter because I have the luxury to not care.
I think this is an article of faith without much empirical backing. In fact, what happens by default is that our ideas about what constitutes a “great fit” include lots of unstated biases, both good and bad. And there’s no guarantee that our assessments of what makes a great fit a priori are accurate.
That depends, but I don't think you'll be making the best decisions when you have a quota to fill, either implicitly or explicitly.
Diversity initiatives rarely use hard quotas. It's goals or objectives at best. I don't think anyone serious about it thinks quote requirements are a good approach.
I remember that, it was really telling. Of course in their minds it was consistent because they think BPT is racist against white people but even if you do believe that, they were way, way more racist than BPT was.
I don't think I'm feeling oppressed. I feel as though I'm on the sidelines of racism, watching it from a narrow perspective. All I have are rough, simple, often black-and-white patterns to look for. I'm holding a few puzzle pieces and sometimes they line up with things that I don't fully understand.
Your standard for racism needs more nuance. Beauticians, dermatologists, photographers, certain doctors, etc. may have to treat people differently based on the color of their skin, and that isn't necessarily racist. Discrimination based on race is racist. The context is always important, and that is the stumbling block most white people get caught on because they are typically underinformed on both historical and contemporary racial context as compared to POCs.
Remember, people of any color can still be flaired and post in BPT.
What exactly made literacy tests racist? Is it racist to give someone a test to see how well they can read? No, but they were used in state-sanctioned efforts to disenfranchise people who had both historical and then-current unequal opportunity to education from their only avenue of exercising their democratic right of choosing representation in the government. In what way do you think it's similar to a private club on the internet having different requirements of users, when any one of them is just as able to create their own club wherever and whenever they like? They are two totally different contexts.
This exactly what I meant about the stumbling block in my first reply to you. If you agree context is important, you need to actually think it through.
Agreed, technically it's racist. But who does it hurt?
It reminds me of the #BLM vs #ALM thing. Sure you can make a good points for #ALM but the real goal, whether conscious or not, is to detract from #BLM.
I think we've finished establishing (culturally speaking) that black people have it rough in America. That being the case, it doesn't seem like a big deal if one subreddit amidst the sea of internet decides to do skin color verification.
My question is, why is it worth the energy to question something so seemingly harmless with clear benefits to a marginalized group?
1) Because this is a thread specifically asking for opinions on it, and 2) because, even as pretty much every comment I've read here agrees that r/BPTs approach has been generally helpful and more good than bad, explicit discrimination on the basis of skin color is a "sharp tool", and it's worth being a little extra cautious any time we use sharp tools, even if we're quite confident we're using them for something good.
And the process is? For the sake of the argument, unless it is the same as the other kinds of verification, you are treating them differently based on race.
Power is an important part of racism. A black employee prioritizing a black customer over a white one is not racist, because they are deprived of power by the system.
I stop just short of saying racism is prejudice + power because you'll run into people who have good criticisms of the issues that simplifying a system to this level can bring - in particular because power structures exist on more than one level and you can get into debates on moral calculus. But treating white people differently on a sub about black people is not racist, especially when you consider the reasoning for why they are.
In what system? If you're speaking of customers to some sort of company, then yes, consistently priorotizing black customers over white ones is racist in my opinion because the system is the company, not the state outside that company or specific transaction that may or may not be systematically racist. The black employee doing the prioritization is building their own system within a system, and both are bad. It's like a Matrjoschka of awfulness.
I agree with you here. As I said, I don't have a problem with people carving out their own spaces on the internet, especially if they're going to talk with voices that are usually not heard.
This gets somewhat into the moral calculus part, but I think it's important to point out that larger systems typically overrule. If a subset of people are being discriminated against by the society as a whole, that really takes precedence over just about everything because of the law of large numbers.
I also think it's important to point out, because many may not be aware, of how the systematic influences of capitalism combined with racism can actually create an incentive for this environment. In this case, this is the lie of 'black capitalism' and is frankly a common occurrence throughout history - where minorities are allowed to establish businesses within a specific sector (be it by physical location such as china towns or by sector such as banking) but are not allowed to, or it is extremely difficult to leave the specific sector due to racism. When its by physical location, such as a black business in a primarily black neighborhood, its actually quite important for the black business owner to cater to their target audience as they are the primary customer.
That does not justify the actions of individuals though.
I agree, but I don't see how catering to ones primary audience would ever arise to being racist, like having a separated queue by race or something. I just don't see that working in a practical example.
It very much depends on the reason. If it's solely because the employee thinks white people are worse than black people, of course it's racist.
I do agree with you further down that larger systems (mostly) supercede smaller ones, which is why it's hard to make blanket statements and teasing out the different layers of context is important, tricky as it might be.
So, essentially, slippery slope? I'm not sure country club threads are at the edge of any slope at all.
There could be some kind of cost-based barrier to entry, like how free to play games sometimes require phone verification. If you get banned you'll need to pay for another sim card, get a new phone number, and gain access again with the new number. This poses a financial hurdle to bad actors, but none to everyone else (since 99.9% of people already have a cell number they can use for this purpose).
What if there was a 3rd party service that did identity verification? Still thinking just phone number based.
I'm pretty sure the percentage of people who have a usable cell number is much lower than 99.9%.. Even among those who would seek to join such a forum I think a simple application process with consistent moderation is better than contriving a financial barrier.
I think this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of BPT, and frankly it's absurdly reductionist. In fact, I doubt anybody will assume you're arguing in good faith while you continue to spew this nonsense.
For one, the stakes are incomparable: those poll tests purposefully disenfranchised an entire race, whereas BPT might, at worst, exclude some people from leaving a comment in a timely manner (since they can, of course, apply to become part of the "country club" later) . Second, poll tests were literally impossible, whereas the BPT application requires two dead-simple answers (as dubteedub explained here), which could regardless be bypassed by lying. In practice, the only people excluded are (1) those too lazy to apply and (2) those with a problematic posting history who don't belong in a safe space for PoC anyway.
If X is Y, how is Z - implied to be Y - not Y?
You first have to show that Z - the criteria for inclusion to the country club threads, or "be a PoC"/"be an ally to PoCs and talk to the mods", presumably followed by a quick post history check to filter racist fuckwits out - is actually Y. As it stands, those two things are unrelated.
Alright, this branch is only getting more and more antagonistic, and I don't see any way that it's suddenly going to reverse course and turn into a productive conversation. So let's stop it here, because everyone's only going to keep getting more frustrated with it.
I'm just asking for now, but I will lock replies in this part of the thread if it starts escalating again.
From my perspective, as a white guy in his 20's, I have to ask what could I contribute to these discussions that would be of quality. I don't participate in /r/BPT as I don't really feel its a community that I necessarily need to be a part of outside of reading general threads. I'm open to any internet forum trying to break the mold and attempt moderation in new and unique ways. Maybe in this situation, if I saw a "white's only" subreddit, I think it would be more of my place than another race to say that isn't cool and should be done away with. I don't come from a disenfranchised group, so I can't tell them how they should regulate their community.
So in general, I say its inconsequential to my world. Seeing as how dominated the internet is by people like me, I'm all for other groups creating their own space and culture on the internet, and trying new ways to do that... With that said, I'm open to CMV if there is a worthwhile argument that can persuade me this is wrong.
Reddit is known for its absolute shit holery and super racist trolling. In a subreddit geared towards black/POC users, why not have a marginally safe place to discuss things with other black users? People on reddit can be disgusting and I know personally I can only stand to have my blood boil so many times. There are soooo many casually racist and prejudice users and it is absolutely everywhere and all over that website. It doesn't have to be overt for it to be tiring and make you feel like shit.
I know there's colorism in the black community at large and that's its own issue, but giving black people a voice in ONE place where they know they're at least a little safe, it's a small price to pay to prove you're actually black. Plus, not every post in the subreddit is for just country club members. People outside of it can still interact with the subreddit. Overall it's a pretty soft block to give a marginalized group a place and a voice.
As a mixed kid, I fucking get it but I won't actually and truly get it like my counter parts who are blacker than me. That's just how society rolls and it fucking sucks. So I say it's not a bad thing and it's a way to give them a place without a bunch of brigading racists dog piling them.
As a non American I find all this things ridiculous. This obsession with dividing and categorizing every little change in race and ethnicity is more harmful than anything else. Who cares about your 10% Iranian and your 3% Cherokee ancestry it is just non sense. Instead of leaving behind race and going forward all together your are going in the exact opposite direction. The day racism ends will be the day when nobody cares about race anymore, not the day where every race has their own ethnostate. The "country club" is just another step in the wrong direction.
I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a special part of the bus just for black people again but this time where the blacks who ask for it.
I'm white, so I don't have any firsthand experience for what it's like to be a person of color in America, but I do know what it's like to be a heavily marginalized minority. I grew up gay in the American south, in a very conservative Christian area (I know you're not from the US, so this just means that I grew up in about the worst possible area for gay people in the country).
I didn't say a word about being gay -- not a peep -- for over a decade of my life, because I was too scared. Instead, during that time, I heard a lot of other people make a big deal about being gay: pastors, teachers, parents, grandparents, friends. The messages I learned were that gay people were scum, were ungodly sinners, were going to hell, deserved AIDS, would never be happy, were pedophiles, etc.
All of these were (presumably) straight people laser focused on the difference of gay people in a powerfully negative way. Meanwhile I, as a gay person, didn't say a word about it. Not a damn word about myself. Imagine keeping a secret from the time you're 10 or so until into your 20s. That was me.
The pressure about myself built up over time, until the dam finally broke and I did come out. Almost immediately I started getting this response: "okay, but why do you have to make such a big deal about it?" Even when I wasn't making a big deal about it. I'd simply mention it and I could see people bristle. I wasn't a walking Pride parade; I wasn't accosting strangers to let them know; in fact, I was pretty strategic in who I told and how I did out of fear of retribution.
I spent over a decade of my life trying to minimize it at all costs while other people got carte blanche to make the biggest and worst prejudices about being gay cultural touchstones, and then when I brought up my mere existence, some people would turn around and put that on me, as if I were the one causing the problem. In reality, I was wanting the exact same thing: I didn't want it to be a big deal! I relished the idea of it being downplayed! I didn't want to have to live in fear, and I didn't want to be treated like a unicorn. I just wanted to live a calm, happy life. Why won't people just leave me alone about this?
It was a complete slap in the face to be subjected to scorn for "making being gay a big deal" when I literally wasn't, all while the people in my life whose prejudices actually were "making being gay a big deal" were never subject to the same focus or condemnation. Their viewpoints, beliefs, and actions are what made being gay such an outsize event in the first place.
The reason I say all of this is because I see in your response a parallel to what I experienced. You appear to be expressing the idea that people of color focusing on their race is a root of the problem, and that their "making a big deal out of it" is detrimental. I think this is an unfair assessment of the situation, because it lets off the hook all of the people who have and continue to "make race a big deal" but in a powerfully negative way.
Their actions deserve equal, if not higher scrutiny. They have created a situation in which, unfortunately, race is given undue focus. But, if we only scrutinize people of color for that reality, we essentially do double damage. We deny the lived realities of the people of color who have unfortunately not yet had the opportunity to have their race not be a big deal in this country, and then we also blame them for that reality, as if they are the only ones responsible for it.
Oh no, I didn't wanted to say that, I don't meant that ".... the idea that people of color focusing on their race is a root of the problem, and that their "making a big deal out of it" is detrimental." Of course racism doesn't exist because people of certain race focus on their own problems. I would say it is the opposite, people of a race saying that the root of their own problems is another race like "mexicans are stealing our jobs". Until we manage to stop that stupid mentality we are doom.
Let me give you an example of my own experience. I have been living in Italy for around 5 years, I have born in Argentina from an italian family so I got the citizenship fairly easy. Since I arrived here, everyday they remember me that I am not italian, every time I speak they say " but, are you italian?" Or "where are you from?" Even if I am talking with my wife in a cafe they interrupt us to ask things like that. And they don't do it for curiosity, it is their way to say "what are you doing in my house".
Now if I go back to Argentina I am a traitor for leaving the country I dress weird, speak with kind of an accent so I am not argentinian anymore. In just 5 years I got stuck on limbo, I don't have any friends besides some expats from another countries and the ones who still talk to me from Argentina. I have given up to the idea of having italian friends and being part of the community.
I feel very touch by your story, my brother is gay and had a similar problem, he open up first to me and I was super cool with that, he got the courage to try the same with my parents and they kick him out of the house. I stayed in the house of my parents and started working when I was 13 to help him to rent a place and eat until he manage to do it alone. Was very traumatic for him but even for me, I couldn't understand why my parents did something like that, I was too young and naive to get it. Luckily he is doing excellent nowadays.
I'm touched by the story of your kindness to your brother, and I'm very happy he's doing well. I also appreciate you sharing your story. That must be incredibly difficult. I've moved within my country multiple times so I know how hard it is to establish friends and a feeling of belonging in a new place, and that's without crossing borders. It must be all the harder for you completely changing countries. I'm so sorry that you have to deal with exclusion, both from Italy and from your home in Argentina. It's not fair to you, and you deserve better.
Based on what you've said here, it sounds like we're actually more in agreement than I originally thought. That said, I am still having difficulty understanding your closing line of your first comment:
Could you clarify this? As written it seems very inflammatory and makes it sound like black people are asking for their own discrimination? This doesn't mirror what you said in your most recent post so I'm thinking I might not be interpreting your intentions correctly.
Sorry again, I am not really good at explaining myself. I will remark this, I am completely against racism, I don't think that the oppressed are the ones to be blame and at the end of the day we both want the best for everyone. But, putting it in another words, I feel like they are combating racism with more racism and that would create even more resistance against the acceptance of the black community between the whites, give excuses to the real racist to be how they are and that could go in the direction of a race war or the complete segregation between races.
Again, I don't mean to offend anybody and maybe my first statements where kind of rushed and confusing. Remember that it is just the opinion of a random person on the internet, I don't have any real answers, sadly. Putting again the example of my brother, my parents have understood the mistake they made and my brother has forgiven my parents. Now they are happier than ever, helping each other and living peacefully. Of course, it is not like they pretend than nothing happened but they have moved forward for the common well. The other option, would be my brother being resentful and angry the rest of his life for being rejected like he has been for more than 15 years, and that thing was eating him alive. I have worked everyday with them to avoid that and I think it is the biggest achievement of my life I dont give a flying fuck about my parents but I feel I have saved the life of my brother.
I hope something similar for the world and maybe is naive and silly but, I don't see another solution.
I think a better way to put it might be that boundaries can be policed from either side? If the goal is to get rid of boundaries, to make things more fluid, this seems counterproductive. But that's an abstract argument and it can work out differently in practice.
The Internet is mostly pretty fluid. It's famously a place with many anonymous forums where nobody knows who you are unless you tell them.
Originally this was thought to be positive. Young people can try on new identities, different ways of being.
In recent years, people have become more concerned with downsides. Anonymous forums can attract terrible people. People can be impersonated. Sometimes it's nice to know whether someone is faking it.
So, Twitter has blue checkmarks, to let you know which celebrity account is official. It's not much, and has downsides, but it has a purpose. Reddit communities use flairs for similar purposes.
When newspapers hide people's identities, they also validate certain things about them. This gives anonymous voices more credibility. It seems to me that it's a useful service? One that might be more widely useful for people who want to post anonymously but with credibility that they're not a complete fake. An anonymous essay was shared here recently by someone who was allegedly an ex-cop, and it would have been nice to know if they actually were.
Obviously a validation service is useful for policing boundaries, and it's not hard to imagine how it could be abused. If there were a general-purpose API for proving your race, you can just imagine the Black Mirror episode.
But it seems like the saving grace is that it's for a limited purpose. Apparently, all that r/BlackPeopleTwitter lets someone do using this service is post anonymously as a black person, in a moderated forum. Full anonymity is the norm everywhere else. And I'm assuming that unlike a country club, all the discussion is public?
(Note for anyone curious: the removed comment here is just because the same comment was accidentally posted twice, not anything bad)
Sorry, I have a terrible connection here.
Be careful. The day racism ends will not be when race is ignored (which your statement can be interpreted as saying), but the day every race is appreciated and respected, and thus differences normalized. The country club is actually a step in that direction, but I don't blame you for not really understanding that as a non-American. It is hard to overemphasize just how much race is fundamental to US society; it is difficult to truly wrap your head around if you don't live there, and even for many people who do. As I recently heard it put by Meloko Mokgosi, "America does not have a race problem, America is a race problem."
That's a tough one.
We aren't in a position to know what the moderators have to deal with, but every community needs some way to avoid being overwhelmed by both well-meaning and hostile newcomers, and it sounds like they might have a particularly vicious eternal September problem.
I think an invite system (like Tildes has) might be a less controversial way of slowing down the influx so that the community can deal with it? But maybe that's not enough. We're not really in a position to second-guess.
It seems unfortunate when anti-racists end up borrowing tactics from racists. It reinforces racial boundaries from the other side. (Another example is the stereotyping talk about "stuff white people like" and "Karens" and so on.)
Getting cut down a bit is just part of being a part of the dominant class. It's table stakes for all the free privilege.
Karen specifically was a personality type in need of a label, I see that meme as nothing but a good thing.
Ideally of course we wouldn't generalize people into groups at all, but until we reach that evolutionary milestone, white people are overdue to take a little shit.
It's not personal unless we make it personal.
That meme is unfair and cruel for women actually named Karen. Similarly for men named Chad.
You'd think the grade-school cruelty of this name-calling would be obvious. It's funny how selective people are about injustice.
Uh, injustice? Let's keep perspective here. I have trouble believing any significant amount of people think anyone who's actually named Karen or Chad automatically fit the stereotypes.
I'm not the person you responded to, but I will say that I have a very hard time separating criticisms of "Karens" out from wider internet misogyny in general. This just seems like the latest evolution of that trend, where people can feel justified in heaping disproportionate criticism on women while hiding behind the worst examples of them as insurance against critiques. I think there's a nugget of worth within the complaints about Karens in identifying aggressive, entitled, and selfish behavior, but it's wrapped up in so much misogyny that it's hard for me to get behind this cultural push.
I'm not talking about the effect on white people, I'm talking about the effect on women named Karen. It seems to be an everyday stereotype, less important on the cosmic scale than many other terrible things going on in the world, but still annoying based on what I've read. I can't find the same article, but here's a quote:
So I'm guessing it's like microaggressions, not individually significant but it adds up when it keeps happening, based on nothing other than what your name happens to be. Although it's an uphill battle where memes are concerned, we should try to teach kids not to be cruel, and try not be cruel ourselves.
Personally, I'm a bit sensitive to all kinds of name-calling. It just comes across as bullying, and has gotten worse now that we have a bully-in-chief. And I think most memes are terrible. It's nice that we don't usually share them here.
Anyway, this is an off-topic digression. I probably shouldn't have brought it up.
For clarity, the "further instructions" for white applicants amounts to writing something explaining why you're an ally.
I never was subbed or paid too much attention to BPT, but I did notice the obvious, ever-growing amount of online blackface as its subscriber count grew. As a result, I don't have too much issue with the verification system, honestly. I tend to side with Jessie Williams: "If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression." I think the people who have real problems with the verification system largely either didn't know the context of how bad it was without it, or were those who wanted to pretend to be black in the first place.
I'd prefer if they built their own platform instead of remaining on reddit, if only so they could really take ownership and reddit wouldn't profit, but it seems a neat enough solution. I'd never submit myself to that sort of process on any site, but there is practically no way black americans can assert boundaries to their own culture or sense of self that won't result in large swaths of white americans feeling offended anyway, so... not a huge deal IMO.
I'm concerned I wouldn't be considered an ally now. What actions should I be taking to consider myself on the right side of the fight? I can't recall ever witnessing something first hand and thinking "this is racism, I need to voice my opposition". So outside of not actively harming someone have I really done anything to deserve the title?
Maybe part of the point is to get you thinking about that.
I think @dubteedub might've been involved in the process of creating those threads? I remember there was a discussion on this a while ago when the country club threads first started popping up. Here it is
The rest of the world/internet/reddit (in order of increasing intensity) is effectively a white-dominated space. It's true that black and other people of colour aren't barred from using reddit, but they are never going to be a dominant voice in any sense. There are just way way too many white people (and way, way too many of them are racists, in absolute numbers) for there to be any way to create a space that allows black people's perspectives to dominate (or even be heard frequently) without banning white people from that space. And it basically doesn't affect me at all, because I have the rest of the internet?
What are the further instructions for white allies, does anyone know? I don't want to apply just to fail away for not having met some criteria that I could have lined up ahead of time, I think that would be a little embarrassing. I don't expect that I would be presented with a hard and fast rubric but still I am not sure whether I could demonstrate an allyship.
I also don't know that I have a reason to post to that subreddit, which as a Twitter repost location seems like a secondary option to just following people's original accounts, right? I guess there's a lot of discussion on reddit.
Should this thread be somewhere besides ~tech? We're mostly talking about race online and not the key issue of how to create space for discussion in much the same way that Tildes has done. Edit: NVM, I guess Deimos has already moved the thread once.
Oh, that's a very simple audit! So much so that the policy itself seems like a non-issue, and a plausible (if laborious for the administrator) method for improving discussion. Thank you for sharing! I will probably lurk for awhile before trying to apply, but this seems utterly legitimate.
An excellent idea that should be implemented elsewhere, if only to see just who is having a meltdown over it to pre-emptively ban them. It can also lead to fewer /r/asablackman hot takes in selected threads, so that's nice, too.
It has been used in a few LGBT+ discords, asking basic questions to users before they are allowed to post, and while it's probably not completely effective, it still makes for a great first-pass filter: bigots are not known for their self-control, if only because so many of them think of themselves as righteous, and not petty evil.
As for anyone who complains about reverse racism or cis-heterophobia, possibly cherry-picking dictionary definitions while doing so - well. Discrimination is only a problem if it can concretely impact people.* Having 50% of the country set against a minority can concretely impact people, on a large scale, quite possibly creating bloody corpses as a result. Having a minority set against 50% of the country - as I described in this thought experiment with hypothetical brown-eye-phobia - can result in some people feeling upset, but even if taken to the extreme it remains indistinguishable from "crazy person attacked me because their voices said so".
* Corollary: if you have managed to scare bigots into keeping their bigotry to themselves, through a combination of social pressure, vigilance, and concrete penalties for discriminating against a protected class, they might still remain bigots, but they are not a problem anymore.
I agree with the bulk of your post, but a note about your corollary: They're still a problem if you silence them, just an invisible one. They become a loud problem once more when someone like Trump comes along and gives them their voice back.
I hope progressives will learn from that mistake. There are a lot of things that shouldn't be tolerated but it's a fine line between that and marginalizing people who we might have instead helped to see another perspective. And we're living though evidence of the danger of pushing self righteous condemnation it too far.
That's mostly because they weren't ever afraid. Racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia might have been addressed in the previous years, but in a patchwork manner and with a slap on the wrist.
It doesn't bother me a bit. And why should it? Currently white folks are in the majority in the US (and on reddit) so there are by default plenty of places for white folks to espouse their feelings and not be drowned out by others. Why shouldn't black folks have a large sub on reddit to have their voices heard without all the anonymous assholes that just have to chime in with their 2 cents where it isn't wanted?
It seems surprising that it would have to come to this instead of just verifying and flairing black people as black, white allies as white allies and putting extra scrutiny over all the other unflaired posters (or just letting people do that themselves even, a flair is a badge that emphasizes and distinguishes you and given the topic at hand, can be used to distinguish you as someone who actually knows what they're talking about) and autobanning some of the more obvious trolls, but if it saves moderator headache, especially if the thread is explicitly about racial issues and especially given the state of moderation on reddit, I can understand doing that.
Otherwise, I'm an uninformed lurker.