Technology

We've removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don't want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.

OP, from this reception you may feel at least a little misunderstood. This is because you are being deliberately misunderstood because whiteness protects itself. Notice that no one commenting thus far has responded to you in good faith, but have only been dismissive or even reject the premise that this even could be a problem outright.

Whiteness is interested in terminating any curiosity that challenges white supremacy. Exclusive white habitus is the expectation of those who identify with whiteness, and deviation is actively resisted. If white people didn't do this there literally wouldn't be white people and racism would be over. It persists because the people who maintain it are cultured to protect it by any means, especially by rejecting all challenges to it outside of an historical context.

The reason I say all this is because I've attempted the same conversation you are attempting now and this has been what's happened every single time. You can't have a good faith conversation with anyone answering in bad faith. I think this effort is worthwhile and support it, but I advise not to waste too much time with anyone here who is more interesting in refuting you than the problem of racism.

Some of the replies here are a bit disheartening, reflexively dismissing this list, the need for it, and the validity of the experiences behind it.

Oh look, it's another old white guy trying to solve a problem he's not affected by and probably hasn't personally experienced.

Edit: Sorry that was so negative, but these are all pretty basic things you're stating. Anyone likely to read this list and action items like this, is likely already staunchly pro black.

Would be good to see some more items that would make people do a double take and say "oh, I do that, I didn't realize that could be construed as anti black". Use your experience as a non black person to try and identify ways that a white person might be impacting black people unintentionally.

Other suggestions:

Social problems cannot be solved by technical solutions e.g. "turning the racism off" by filtering or blocking others as a user (run from any instance that takes this approach instead of defederating or blocking at an instance level).

If your instance is shit and gets blocked, don't complain that it got blocked, either complain to the admins of the shit instance or move instances.

Boost the things they say about their experiences or the experiences of others and boost things they care about because likely it'll benefit people at the very least by raising awareness.

This is all hard to do because it is hard to determine people's race on lemmy. Some usernames give it away but most don't. And I don't go snooping trough their post history to find that out.