In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like “maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don’t see it on Lemmy.” Then again, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don’t see racism even when they’re looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. … but that wasn’t really the thrust of that discussion.

So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you’ve seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!

  • ilovecheeseEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    I appreciate it probably comes from good intentions, but generalizing how entire groups of people should change to suit another group of people is a slippery slope.

    • Plopp@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      4 months ago

      I hear you, and in general I absolutely agree. However I definitely believe that it’s valid in cases like these. I’m one of the affected, I’m white, and I’ve never seen racism on Fedi, and I take this as nothing but a group of people trying to help me see if I have any unintentional racist blind spots (which I’m pretty much guaranteed to have, as we all have them). It’s a good thing for everyone.

      • ilovecheeseEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Absolutely we all have blind spots, I just think OP’s blind spot is addressing ‘white people’ like none of us live with, and around many cultures, not just races.

        If someone were to address my local Polish or Bangladeshi or Muslim or whatever community the same way OP is addressing ‘white people’ in this post I would call it borderline racist and in fact it would fit in OP’s original ‘don’t do’ list.

        • Plopp@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          4 months ago

          Yes, but context matters. Not that I have any statistics, but I would assume the Fediverse as a whole is predominantly white to an almost absurd degree. Had someone who represents a very small minority in Bangladesh turned to the Bangladeshi people to adress concerns of racism they experience all over Bangladesh from Bangladeshi people I would hardly call that controversial.