Comment on 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 month agoSeeing how society is consciously trying to move beyond white inherently being good and black inherently being bad, I think it’s perfectly right for someone to ask you to check your verbage. Just switch to allowlist/denylist like the rest of tech has done.
alyaza@beehaw.org 1 month ago
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.
like 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 the subject like they’re the reason any of this is a problem!)
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 month ago
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.
alyaza@beehaw.org 1 month ago
i simply do not think that this is racist 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)
Iapar@feddit.org 1 month ago
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?