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TV-MA
@TV-MA

You want to know if your corner of Cohost is responsible for upholding a white supremacist culture? Here is a guide to help you understand. The bullet point list is derived from a work called "From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups." I haven't read it, but if you'd like to, PDF Here

Non-white people: I carry this around for situations where I'm the one dissenting voice experiencing racism. As we all know, racism usually doesn't look like ppl hurling slurs and more often looks like tone-policing, getting call aggressive for reacting in rational ways, etc. I use this guide to remind me when I'm being gaslit. I also use it to make sure I don't fall into the same pitfalls described in the guide.

White people: This will help you recognize the culture in those around you and yourself. I suggest keeping it around if you are looking to get more active in fighting against this culture.

For all intensive purposes, "organization" = Cohost and "people in power" = the racial majority (white people) on this site (people in power do not equal the 5 devs at cohost. If anything they've said in the past is relevant, they are still considered part of the overall racial majority of the site). Because the document doesn't map 1-to-1 with a social media, some of these points are irrelevant or don't make sense in terms of "people in power." We'll ignore those. Also sorry there's some weird formatting on some of these.

I'm going to highlight some of these points of White Supremacy Culture I've seen transpire on this website for the last few days. If any of you have had trouble connecting how certain actions on this site have been racist, this will hopefully give you a clearer understanding.

mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making
them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

Example: someone I have blocked did something bad so if they complain about racism it isn't valid

equating individual acts of unfairness against white people with systemic
racism which daily targets people of color

Another way to spin the last one,: the person u mentioned did X so you should give equal weight to what they did and the racism they are experiencing

a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that people's
feelings aren't getting hurt or working around defensive people

emphasis on being polite

invalidating people who show emotion

Ie, if you are capping for racists, I shouldn't be allowed to say fuck you

if it's not in a memo, it doesn't exist

This is what the pushback to the new missing stair community guidelines look like. Not everything can be in writing and in order to have good moderation, discretion is needed. Sorry!

those with strong documentation and writing skills are more highly valued,
even in organizations where ability to relate to others is key to the mission

This is what it looks like every time someone bombards this site with 20 chapters of text instead of saying sorry for being racist. This is what it looks like when white ppl circulate giant meta posts giving the benefit of doubt to other white ppl for their racism.

those with power assume they have the best interests of the organization at
heart and assume those wanting change are ill-informed (stupid), emotional,
inexperienced

Lot's of victim blaming these last few days

when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to
blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is
actually causing the problem

the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological
comfort

scapegoating those who cause discomfort

The backbone of all the racist harassment on this site


Sumac
@Sumac

To a serial abuser in leftist spaces, denying them their own comfort and public face is abuse, and they will find ways to push out people who quietly dissent. It's sometimes essential to have a direct and public conversation about what's going on if you want anything to change.

I don't generally talk about anything too heavy or personal, but I wanted to throw this into the conversation because I've heard a few people talking about the racism discussion on cohost as if it won't effect them either way, so they're just waiting for either everyone else to figure it out, or for everyone to leave for somewhere new. Do not leave this to other people to figure out. People using these methods to be racist are often going to use the language of inclusion and anti-ableism to control the conversation and maintain the status quo.

I was in a few leftist discords over the past few years where the person at the top fell into multiple of these. In both of these servers, the leadership would engage actively on the problems of "our server is too white, how do we fix this?" while also falling back on these exact behaviors constantly to police and control the people in the server.

In one case a very talented black artist would be frequently held up as a pillar of the community by the server admin, but in group discord calls would be singled out (and only they would be singled out) and criticized for tone, voice volume, how hard they laughed, etc. When confronted with this, the server admin would spin it as a matter of disability, and try to frame it in such a way that the person in the wrong was the one pointing out that they are consistently policing the language and emotional expression of one of the only actively engaged black people on the server. They in turn never criticized the myriad white people who would be stoned and equally or much more boisterous on calls. There was always a Reason for why you, the person pointing out that the admin was being racist, is actually being ableist by calling out that racism!

These kinds of people will often have an array of reasons at the ready to explain away abusive and racist behavior - they might even have a self-diagnosed condition that you yourself have been diagnosed with and treated for in a clinical setting for a decade or more, but instead of recognizing the ways it influences their behavior and try to correct against that, they use it to justify and empower their abuse and racism. "I have this condition, so I am going to behave abusively, or I'm going to scold black people for being too loud because of sensory issues, and it's ableist to ask me to change because I Can't Help It" is a common refrain from these kinds of abusive personalities. It would never occur to this sort of person to simply turn down the volume on someone on a call, instead they insist that the other person change how they express themselves completely, and place themselves in the position of constantly policing that expression. Self-diagnosis is not something I'm against generally, but when you diagnose yourself with a condition and use it as a foil to avoid criticism for abusive behavior, do not think for an instant that everyone does not see what you're doing. In doing so you are painting people with that condition as inherently abusive, which is actually incredibly harmful and absolutely ableism at its worst.

And don't think to yourself "yeah... but I'm white so this can't get used against me..." and assume you can just keep your head down and fix things non-confrontationally and quietly. On both this and the follow-up server made from people who fled the first server, the head admin would use the language of inclusion and personal comfort to victimize and abuse people emotionally and sexually. Both admins personally pressured me for sexual favors and would grow abusive and lash out when I rebutted them, using the language of leftism to explain to me why I'm harming them when I withdraw my consent. Then the day after their resulting abusive tirade, they'd slap me with a bunch of new rules for interacting with them, so that "I don't set them off" again. When I'd point out that the inciting incident was telling someone they had done something inappropriate, a simple disagreement about a matter of fact in a server channel, or that they were doing this in response to me withdrawing consent, they'd couch it in the language of ableism and scold me for making them feel bad.

The people who use the methods outlined in the post above to control and manipulate conversations about racism are probably also using them to control and manipulate a lot more that you can't see on the surface, and you should not give people doing this the benefit of the doubt! It's important to call this stuff out too. If all you do is DM the person responsible and give them a chance to save face and not "look racist" in front of everyone else, chances are they will use these methods to make you look like the bad guy again, or might actually label your own behavior as abusive, for bringing their abusive behavior to attention. Then they will go back to publicly musing about how weird it is that their community is all-white, and ask the community to brainstorm ways to fix it. But not fix it really, just think of fluffy, easy fixes that won't make anyone feel bad. :)


dismallyOriented
@dismallyOriented

This happens a lot with racism, but it is a ego-protection mechanism that can get wielded against any kind of criticism. You can see this in relationships too, if you try to raise criticism against some behavior that's causing problems, and the response is always shrinking and foregrounding their own pain, without ever engaging with the root problem. It is you, the critic, who is the problem - can't you see how you're hurting me?

This is not to say that pain is always illegitimate. Lord knows people can have outsized reactions to things for any manner of reason, and there's a reason people will call for breaks during a Rough fucking discussion so they can gather themselves enough to have it productively. But your actions cannot end simply at "I am hurt, therefore I must soothe or eliminate the hurt." Even if you are fragile, even if your capacity is small, it's also on you to learn how to manage that capacity, and to practice building it. If a person's reaction to criticism is always collapse, they will never be able to handle that criticism constructively, or make the necessary changes to grow and prevent the issue from recurring. If you want to be in community with others, you have to build the capacity to manage your hurt well enough to face things. A refusal to manage one's own fragility or ever build capacity to handle criticism is a bad behavioral pattern that can signal bad faith or at least produces the material result of perpetuating the problem indefinitely because they never proceed to the step where they can Actually rectify the problem.

Pay attention to people who do this all the time. Pay attention to the pattern and the material effect. That is what will be able to help you spot chicanery, when it happens to you or others.


atax1a
@atax1a
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in reply to @TV-MA's post:

If you spend time on any social media platform, the answer is yes whether you ask the question or not. The point of this isn't to point fingers, but to actively dismantle that culture.

"emphasis on being polite"

"invalidating people who show emotion"

"those with power assume they have the best interests of the organization at
heart and assume those wanting change are ill-informed (stupid), emotional,
inexperienced"

This shit is WAY too fucking common on political twitter, especially the br*tish side of it.

Thank you for sharing this.

I have not yet read the linked text, only the highlights but:

"those with strong documentation and writing skills are more highly valued,
even in organizations where ability to relate to others is key to the mission"

Stands out so much. This is like the explicit strategy of people who don't hide their supremacist intentions. The root of the caricature that shouts "debate me"

And I've been in well intentioned spaces ruled by this doctrine. This is where I'd love to say "but I'm better at documentation than they were so I beat them at their own game." But it doesn't work like that. They can just shift to another defense mechanism. Sure you have all the evidence and put it all together in a single package we can read without even swearing but... don't you think you're kind of making a scene?

It's like a bait so they can dismiss writings that are quick AND force people to spend time and energy on writings that will also be dismissed on some other pretense

Bingo. This is why I try to be brief with these clowns. If you need to write 10 volumes of text to back up your point, then it sounds like you're trying to overwhelm me more than you actually know what your point is.

Thank you for sharing this. The "emphasis on being polite" is the one that gets me the most. This is "None of the dissent we allow can be disagreeable or unpleasant" disguised as "Please be nice" and many (usually whites) simply don't understand that if there's a problem of this magnitude to begin with, the time to be fucking nice about it is never.

It's hard to deprogram myself from the mentality, no-one really wants to FEEL like they're being shouted at even when it's not what's actually going on. I usually try to remind myself that people aren't angry for no reason. It is always reasonable and morally correct to be angry at the problem when the problem is THIS one.

Thank you for sharing this. Haven't been as in touch with the social media spaces and the issues everyone's dealing with there but reading over it 100% matches the struggles I've been seeing in the in person community I've been participating in lately, and that document I think is going to prove extremely useful in contextualizing and addressing issues there.