Building off some good discussion in the other thread today. I’m thinking about how can white Hexbear users can be better here, and in leftist spaces, AND when we engage with the broader BIPOC communities? What are we doing wrong, and what can we do that’s better?
And I 100% get that’s it’s not on marginalized folks to explain it to us. I do. It’s just, at this moment I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeling like it’s just not possible to make the world better. Not even get us to socialism, just getting things to be a tiny bit better. I don’t know what else to do. So I’m reaching out to my BIPOC comrades with an open hand. If you feel like sharing, please do.
For the white folks, we need to be better. We do. It may not be comfortable to hear, but we do. Maybe we’re not as bad as the libs and the chuds on this but that’s not a valid measuring stick. Come on.
As I mentioned in that thread, there's no real way of Hexbear not beating the mayo city allegations unless there's a radical cultural shift. By radical, I mean a radical shift where people self-dox their faces, the admins and mods are all POC with their nonwhite faces as avatars, and the people who are white get a one-strike policy. This might seem radical, but that's essentially how Hexbear became so trans friendly. Half the mods are trans, and one of the trans mods went to town on terfs and other transphobic reactionaries early in this website's history.
All this talk about listening to POC's voices and whatever is fine except as demonstrated by the existence of /r/asablackman, various white people get off of pretending to be POC. Whether it's to claim some scholarship that's supposed to be reserved for Indigenous people a la Elizabeth Warren or as some disgusting form of digital blackface, white people do this shit all the time. This means that even well-meaning attempts like /c/em_poc won't actually attract POC users in the end because no one can be sure whether the mods and users there aren't just white people pretending to be POC like they always do.
The other option would be for Hexbear to no longer be exclusively English-speaking, which is even more untenable. Imagine if half of Hexbear was in Arabic. Obviously, it would no longer be mayo city, but it would essentially be two distinct communities awkwardly stitched together. Moderation would be impossible as well. What if someone from Arabic Hexbear said some transphobic shit in Arabic? Who's going to be in charge of moderation? How many people are bilingual in English and Arabic and willing to be a mod and are ideologically in line with this website?
A new Lemmy instance could be build from the ground up where you have to show your face so people would actually know what ethnicity you are. This, of course, would mean the politics of that instance would have to be completely toned down, and it seems extremely unlikely that people here would actually use this new instance.
Overall, this website will always be 80% white, and it will never beat the mayo city allegations lol. The 20% need to find other social media, ideally a non-European language one, that they can use whenever the 80% is being weird about race again.
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WTF incident inspired this thread?
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