moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (1/14)
I want to do an experiment. I apologize for how self-indulgent this is, but ... y'know, like, a whole thing with this kind of blowup is that the original context is lost, so I want to see what happens if that context is reintroduced. I'm sure none of this will need explanation to folks who have been following this story.
(That said, feel free to ask for explanation - we didn't see all of this but we saw a lot.)
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (2/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. In a pretty clear-cut way, for anyone who knows what reverse racism looks like. It shouldn't've been said, in our humble opinion, but it was.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (3/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, a fediblock post was made highlighting the racist remark for the benefit of instance moderators whose users (and selves) might otherwise be harassed by someone willing to make flagrantly racist remarks.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (4/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, a fediblock post was made, possibly unintentionally, denouncing a series of recent fediblock posts describing antiblackness. In the opinion of this user, describing the aforementioned racist remark as antiblack was merely the latest in a sequence of time-wasting nonsense clogging up a useful hashtag.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (5/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, a thread was made analyzing the conversation containing the racist remark for the benefit of those for whom the racism was unclear. It was also critical of the other participants in that conversation for their choice to attack a Black instance for specious reasons, but it was not a fediblock post, just a discussion.
(This was our contribution, obviously.)
content warning: suicide on the next post
feel free to skip it - it's not essential to the point, and you'll know what it said from context.
content warning: suicide -- moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (6/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, everyone who disagreed with the person in whose thread the racist remark was made was told to "kys" - "kill yourself" - and members of two instances (not the original one being discussed) were told they would be beat up if they showed their faces around that person.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (7/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, a fediblock thread was made about a series of violent remarks directed at two other instances by the person who started the thread, a thread that was later elaborated upon to talk about a history of problematic behavior on the part of the person making the threats.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (8/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, the person in whose thread the racist remark was made defended, most strenuously, the innocence of her misinterpreting the name of the Black instance.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (9/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, criticism of the person in whose thread this remark was made was described, in passionate terms, as a hate campaign intended to silence a trans woman.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (10/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, a short thread was made exhorting people to talk with each other rather than make public criticisms, and declaring that everyone is flawed and they should be accepted anyway. (The poster of this thread also boosted the aformentioned it's-an-anti-trans-hate-campaign post.)
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (11/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, people accused those talking about racism of lashon hara - speaking truths that harm someone in a way that does no good in the world - a concept about which a blog post had recently gone at least slightly viral.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (12/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. Therefore, the instance shut down, citing the danger posed to Black participants on fedi by widespread racism and a lack of support.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (13/14)
A racist remark was made about a Black instance. A lot of things happened afterwards. Some of those things had to do with the racist remark. A lot of the things had to do with discrediting the critics of that remark.
Frankly, we feel a bit disheartened, too. I'm glad there's been a fair bit of support within our personal circles, but the amount of hostility we've heard about is exhausting.
moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (14/14)
"Packbats", the strawman in our head asks: "...why did you post this?"
Because this pattern happens constantly. https://crommunist.com/2013/06/14/imagine-you-had-a-friend/ is from nine years ago and nothing's changed since. And something that makes this kind of overwhelming snarl marginally less overwhelming is to remember where the conversation started, why anyone said /anything/, and interpret what follows as reactions to /that/.
moth zone antiblackness meta
@packbat Thanks a lot for this thread! I don't follow the people involved, so the meta posts made me worried, but did not clarify anything (but managed to convey that asking questions would be insensitive). This series of posts not only explained what happened from your perspective, but also gave enough details to make it possible to reconstruct the reasoning of the other side (at least the non-malicious part, the malicious part is sorta obvious a priori...), both of which are needed to understand the failure mode and make it less likely to occur in the future. All in all, a thread of great public utility, 10/10, would recommend.
