Obviously this is a highly incendiary post, and the poster probably knew full well it would be incendiary. I have a question about this warning, and I have a problem with the warning. Problem first:
Ambiguous language in the moderator’s warning. This is a recurring problem, and I’m pretty sure I and other posters have made this request before: please make warnings (and mod notes) specific and directive as to what the problem was with a post. It’s very frustrating to see this kind of ambiguity in warnings and moderator instructions, again and again, which just makes it a little bit harder to avoid breaking the rules in the future. There are a few possibilities for this specific post – it was very incendiary, possibly to a level that was deemed warnable. It was about race, and perhaps the moderator believed it was racist or hateful. Perhaps it was considered jerkish or trolling. Or perhaps a combination. But there’s no reason that the justification for the warning should be omitted. Do the moderators and staff consider this kind of ambiguity acceptable, or are there guidelines about the language used for moderator instructions? If not, please institute a practice going forward that moderator instructions should be absolutely crystal clear about what posters should avoid doing in the future. If this kind of ambiguity is acceptable, why on Earth is this so, when it just takes a few more keystrokes to spell out the reasoning?
Now the question:
If this post was warned due to racism or hatefulness, I believe this should be discussed. Is it as simple as any broad-brush negative sentiment about any racial group, no matter the what/why/context, is considered racism or hatefulness? If this post was tweaked to “that majority of white people who support Trump” rather than the very broad “white people”, would it have been warned? Something else?
Sorry, is this a joke? Blank Slate literally said:
”Trumpism is a disease and white people are the virus that unleashed it on America. Until white people are outnumbered and out-bred, soon thankfully, the disease will spread unchecked.”
Jonathan Chance probably didn’t specify what the warning was about because he assumed he didn’t need to! Change ‘white’ to ‘black’, and ‘Trumpism’ to pretty much anything else, and you’d have something that wouldn’t look out of place on the Daily Stormer. What’s to discuss?
And of course the post would’ve been treated differently if it’d said “The majority of white people who support Trump” instead of just “white people”. Though, in the interests of fairness it’d probably be remiss not to include the 28% of Hispanics who voted Trump, and the 10% of blacks who voted for him, too. At which point you might as well just say ‘Trump voters’ or ‘conservatives’. But yeah, if Blank Slate had gone off on white Trump voters instead of just white people generally then his post would obviously have been treated differently because it would’ve said something different.
Blank Slate seems to be channeling Huey Freeman. I’m certainly glad that the moderators aren’t buying into the notion that because racist rants against monolithic white people may be far less harmful, it’s a good idea to embrace them or to deny that they are still racist. That seems to be the debate that you want to have, because I can’t see any other way in which the reason for the warning is not self-evident.
Yeah, I was all set to get my undies in a bundle til I read the offending post. Oh, man, textbook over-the-top racism, hot-button-pushing, and ignorance all in one.
My mod note would’ve been even more ambiguous: “What the…? Red card!”
I’m sure this is why – and if so, that’s a false assumption. It takes virtually no effort to specify the reason, and there’s no reason moderators should make such an assumption. Why should there be any resistance to something as simple as being sure to specify the reason and justification for moderation?
This is what my question is about. Does this board consider that “XXXX about white people” and “XXXX about black people” are identical, moderation-wise? I was under the impression that the boundaries were not quite so bare-bones and simple, so to speak, but rather allowed enough nuance to recognize (as I believe) that there are some circumstances in which this kind of thing can be very different depending on what’s being discussed – i.e. that sometimes “XXXX about black people” is racist and hateful, but the same or similar sentiment about white people is not. It’s not an easy topic or an easy thing to discuss.
But here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
“For most of American history, white people as a group were hateful, violent, and deadly enemies to be feared by black people.”
IMO, that’s definitely not a racist or hateful sentiment. But the reverse would be very racist and hateful, IMO. Very different circumstances, even if the words are pretty much identical, IMO. I’m interested in the rules as the board sees them.
Those white folks who worked in the underground railroad or fought for civil rights were hateful and violent, right?
Hate and violence are a human condition. White people have never been as hateful and violent to black people as Hutus were to Tutsis. But that doesnt mean that many whites were not hateful and violent. Hitleresque sentiment doesnt help anyone understand anything.
The vast majority of white folks didn’t fall into those categories. But debating this sentiment probably would deserve its own thread. My question is about whether there is room for nuance in the board rules on this topic (as well as my frustration with the lack of clear moderator instructions).
Yeah, I’m with iiandyiiii. I prefer a little more nuance in poster assertions, being a #notallwipipo proponent, but I also think some latitude can be cut in the face of the enormous patterns at work. This might be deserving of a note, but the vague warning and threat of suspension were OTT in my opinion.
I’m curious as to why you’re asking the question in the first place. Why do you want to know exactly where the line is? Why not just err on the side of caution and refrain from generalising? Isn’t that simpler, as well as fairer?
I usually try very hard to avoid generalizing – I’m not worried about breaking this rule, whatever it is. I know there are no exact lines (and I’m fine with that). I want to see if the staff generally considers certain types of statements related to race to be racist/hateful regardless of the races described, in addition to my frustration about ambiguous moderator instructions.
I think it’s a straw man to suggest that comments about white people might be moderated identically to comments about minority racial groups. I see not sign of that, look how long (ridiculously long, imo) the divisive Huey Freeman nonsense was tolerated in the interest of “listening”. I would very surprised if your hypothetical example comment, which is simply a statement about history, would be moderated.
But I hope you wouldn’t advocate a position that anything goes in hateful and divisive commentary that treats all modern white people as a monolithic group. Don’t you think calling “White Folks” a “virus” is over that line? If not - do you think there is a line at all, or do you think anything goes? Where do you think the line is?
I’m asking the question because I think this is a good thing to discuss. I expect there’s some nuance, but I’d like to see what the staff thinks.
I don’t know exactly. I saw the post in question as about whiteness (which has been discussed in many threads) – the concept that is responsible for all this terrible stuff in the first place. I’d agree with the characterization of whiteness as a terrible virus, and destroying the concept of whiteness has nothing to do with violence in any way. But I’m reading that post with my own biases and understandings, and of course others’ will vary. So I think it’s worth discussing.
Forgive me, but that’s a really dumb way to read a post that mentions ‘whiteness’ zero times, but mentions white people and how diseased they are six times. The post addresses white people as a monolith and attacks them as a group, and any other reading is simply dishonest. It’s a racist post. End of story. So racist is it, in fact, that debating whether or not it’s racist is, in itself, an act of racism. It strikes me as JAQ’ing off, frankly.
As I said when Huey Freeman was here, history and context matter, which is why changing “white people” to “black people” doesn’t work.
Once again, it’s amusing when people who presumably belong to the ethnic in-power group that has racially discriminated and marginalized others lecture people who are (I assume) members of the group that has experienced racism.
The problem with saying “history and context matters” is that it can be morphed into a get-out-of-jail free card for virtually any bad behavior against a ‘privileged’ group. It’s something of a carte blanche.
You can allow, for instance, a woman to make any offensive statement slamming men and saying “it’s OK for us, not okay for them, because historically they’ve been privileged and we weren’t.” Ditto for race - minorities vs whites, Muslims vs. Christians, anything. That sort of double standard would be considerably worse than just clamping down on offensive attacks as a whole, board-wise.
Is Trump not a problem created by white people? I mean, all the evidence seems to indicate that this is a fact. Who put Trump into power? It wasn’t Blacks. It wasn’t Latinos. It wasn’t Asians.
More importantly, many whites - a shit ton actually - who voted for Trump made it very, very clear why they put him into power. Trump didn’t exactly use bait-and-switch tactics here.
If you were a Jew living in Nazi Germany and watching your families being rounded up and put on trains to labor camps, would you not be at least somewhat tempted to think of Germans as lower-than-dirt scum? Trump isn’t something that’s in the abstract, folks; he’s putting real people in fucking cages. His policies are killing people. His policies are breaking up families permanently. His policies are taking food off the table and healthcare and medicine away from the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. People who voted for him are white, and they know what they’re voting for. I get that white people on SDMB didn’t vote for Trump, but if you’re not white, then it doesn’t matter who did and who didn’t.
This isn’t to say that absolutely anything and everything goes, but I think that if white people are going to force the rest of the population to suffer through Trump, the least they could do is grow some thicker skin and maybe allow people who are actually threatened by his rise to power a little room to vent.