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4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Technology
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most of the issue is and has always been off-instance users, who for a variety of reasons (some intentional, some because of UI/user experience/just plain unawareness due to the nuances of federation) tend to respond to threads like these in ways that our on-instance users don't. to combat this we may or may not switch to a whitelist in the future instead of a blacklist, which is what we have now; if that occurs, it will probably be when we move to Sublinks
Phrasing?
there is no phrasing to be redone; it's the official wording, i am decidedly not a person offended by the whitelist/blacklist terminology, and i think if you can only racialize this verbiage when you hear it that's weirdness on your part. i'm sure there are some people who have problems with it, but i genuinely don't know that i've ever--as a black person--thought for a second about this outside of white people getting offended on my behalf. certainly not when online spaces struggle with so much actual racism, ignorance, and dismissiveness of those prior two things (as has been on display in this thread).
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.
i cannot stress this enough: 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 this subject like they're the reason any of this is a problem!)
i simply do not think that this is racist or worth caring about 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. and how we're doing this in a thread where some people are just unambiguously being racist.)
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?
I've seen increasing usage of "allowlist/denylist" .