Please identify yourselves.
I’m part of the Caucasian Caucus (reference). I wanted to hear from our fellow Fedi users who were black, and hear how things have been for them here. I was going to make a follow up question, to ask them how we could make the Fediverse a more safe and welcoming place for them. It was all with good intent from me. Just wanting to make the world a better place, in any way I can.
Find i’m less likley to find seething racists commenting under a news headline, but i also don’t think those kinds of stories circulate as much on here.
Legitimate question: why can’t black people be people, and must always be “folks”?
As a pasty, hand-wringing white boy, I find that “folks” is a softer word with basically the same meaning. The phrase “black people” is really easy to infuse with venom - those Ps are easy to spit, accidentally or worse - and is at least one step too far along the euphemism treadmill for me, whereas “black folks” feels a lot softer and kinder.
And as one other commenter says about themselves, I’ve found that I use the word “folks” for other maligned groups too. I think I used it in a thread about furries the other day.
How the targets of the word take it, I couldn’t tell you, but I’d bet I’d find some who’d be fine with it, and others who’d think I’m an idiot. That’s just the way it goes.
Okay I use the word folks for everyone. I’ll accidentally sometimes switch back and forth by mistake, but folks, to me, means people.
Same, it’s a normal word in my vocabulary. It’s a classic word that’s been in English for centuries. I never thought of it as a “lesser” or “simpler” term.
Though I can’t deny that ever since the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English words have had a split of “class” between words from native English/Germanic origins vs words from French/Latin. It’s why we have multiple terms for so many things, with the ones from the French rulers often being perceived as “fancier” than the ones that the “common” English natives used. Like how a “boutique” is fancier than a “shop,” or how rich people live in “mansions,” not “houses.”
With that being said, I use it for all manner of people, including for “rich folk.” Maybe I’m subconsciously connecting with the common people (in that I’m one of them), or maybe I just like the way it sounds. Either way, I’m not choosing the word based on the subject at hand, I’m choosing it because it’s a perfectly cromulent word and I like it.
I thought when addressing a specific subset of a population you could say “folks” ?
You can, maybe its an Americanism and outside of America you’d get weird looks, but folks is a good way to refer to a group of people?
I live in the US South and “folks” is a normal word for “people” here. I’m intentional not looking it up and trying to go from memory to get my dialect. I don’t use it for “humanity”, but will for any subset. “The folks who live in that house.” “White folk.” “City folk.” I dunno. There’s a shit ton of dialects in the US South East and they differ by geography and income and race and all kinds of stuff. And maybe they aren’t dialects. I’ve heard “register”. I’m not a language knower.
Should you use the term “black folks”? Ask a couple black folks if it makes em feel bad. Do what they say. Don’t listen to this white boy.
It’s built into my dialect so I’d use it. But if folks told me it made them feel bad if stop.
I have no idea when I pluralize it and when I don’t.
Yeah, as someone who grew up in Canada, folk doesn’t seem all too bad either. It’s certainly better than “kind.”
you see this with trans and nb people as well, it’s always “folks” all of a sudden. sometimes even “folx”
The old internet was better. You were either a user or a luser.
Holy loaded question, Batman.
Grab your popcorn!
Thanks!
These questions make me racist against white people and im white
ITT: White people arguing.
isn’t that like…just normal?
How would your race make a difference?
This is an “I don’t see color” sentiment.
Your race shapes how you interact and interpret the world, not because of nature but nurture. People of different races will have different experiences with the same source of media or media environment.
Kinda, but then the same would apply to someone who is from a different place, even a different area of the same country.
Yes.
A lot of stuff here does look odd to a European such as I am, and I am sure the people writing it don’t understand that they’re assuming all the world works like their own nation does.
But that is not the point of this post. If you want to ask about my experience on Forumverse, then create a separate post for that.
You’re essentially hijacking a conversation here.
I suppose a simplistic way of putting it is that culture is likely to be more relevant here than race, though I suppose culture could be influenced by race in some areas.
Then for a fair few people it may just feel like internet culture and Lemmy develops it’s own culture as a subset of that, even individual instances or communities may have their own culture too - slrpnk and ml are pretty different.
A being more relevant than B does not mean B is not relevant.
It should. You really don’t want a relay race and F1 on the same track. It would be a bloodbath.
Maybe I do want that… Romans seemed to enjoy a bloodbath.
One of the best players of DBD I know is a black streamer.
It’s a 1v4 game, so the killer has their chance to dedicate particular attention to any one of the four survivors. He has (entertaining) montages of killers chasing him down the whole game, to the detriment of their overall victory. It clearly becomes very personal.
They can’t even tell he’s black through the game lobby, yet obsessive racism seems to guide their hand in the dumbest goddamn way.
Feel like that would more be due to being a streamer than black, surely? No idea what the game is but I can see the appeal of hunting down streamers first.
I watch plenty of other streamers of the game that spend most of the match not getting chased. Theres a heavy proportion of players that insert “ttv” in their name, while major streamers don’t even do that, and often operate with anonymous profiles. Basically, it’s not so practical to spot out a streamer during live matches unless someone is putting a lot of planning into sniping them as they play.
Well yeah it depends on the game community and how obvious you are about it
I don’t know why race would make a difference in someone’s experience on a website given that you can’t see the people you’re talking with.
Unrelated but given the amount of casual misogyny I see on Lemmy I think “wow, maybe I don’t enjoy this place that much.” and interact less often because of it, even though I know it’s not aimed at me since they can’t see me when they hit post!
Oh wait…
I don’t have the data on hand, but casual racism against black people on the internet is probably much more common than against white people. I imagine exposure to racism affects the recipients.
I think no matter the space, you can have a varying experience, and there’s no better way to know than to ask
I’m sensing some resistance here, lol.
I feel like it’s always not POC who feel weird about it. Lemmy is a Western site, Westerners are known for being not just racist but violently racist (white supremacy is the “ideology” that allows for colonization and Transatlantic slave trade after all, and places like America have ICE for brown people and the police for black people, many of these folks will just end up being incarcerated and enslaved like back in the day), plus American current admin is openly and loudly racist amongst other things so why should it be surprising that some racist takes/vibes would be felt in a Western (mostly American?) site? You might not notice, ofc, the way a fish doesn’t notice water, but you should expect it at least in theory.
You’re telling on yourselves: you’re either a POS white supremacist in denial, or you’re weak minded and scared of potential accountability to the point you’d rather deny the experience of those who have suffered because of an ethnocultural trait of your peoples. Of course, it’s better to be the latter than the former. 👍
This may shock you, but there are vile racists all over the globe. Ever tried being a black guy in Japan?
Hasn’t been my experience (I haven’t been to Japan yet, I know they’re xenophobic, lol) but I bet they’re not violent or historically, extremely inhuman about it. And if Lemmy was a majority Japanese site, I also wouldn’t be surprised if most people here held some racist/xenophobic beliefs, of course! They kind of are the Germanics of the East after all, lol. Idk what this means, are you a black guy telling me “it’s not just Westerners!” (ofc, there’s even colourism in African communities, I know because I married into one!) for whatever reason or are you a white dude saying the same? Cause, if it’s the latter, you’re just making my point…
They were violently racist towards Okinawan Japanese at one point, and part of the reason Japan is largely a monoculture now it’s that a lot of the native people on the smaller islands got completely wiped out
Add to that the well known atrocities committed against the Chinese in WW2, backed and fueled by an ideology of racial supremacy, and you can see why they could see eye-to-eye with the West. 🤷
Are black people unverally at the bottom of every racist hierarchy? I imagine some countries distribute their antipathy differently. “I wouldn’t live in country X as a black person because they are obviously racist because of how they treat this non-black population, Y,” doesn’t necessarily follow. Like just because a country treats it’s native population badly, doesn’t necessarily mean they would treat black badly (though it certainly isn’t a good sign).
wat
You’re creating a rebuttal for an argument that nobody made
Not explicitly, but it sounds like it’s a possible background assumption, maybe more to gurty’s comment. Anyway, not accusing anyone of anÿthing. The fear of being called racist stops a lot of people in their tracks, including the track of investigating their underlying assumptions.
I was with you until I got to the last paragraph. You’re not wrong about racism being rampant in the western world, but there’s no reason to sling accusations at OP.
I’m glad to hear it, but I think you misread me at the end. I wasn’t throwing accusations at OP, but at the downvoters who, in my view, can only fall into one of two camps.
I just noticed that the score is positive now but when I got here OP was heavily downvoted.
Why would race change your experience on online platforms?
Racists my dude, racists.
You see in Reddit, for example, /r/jokes posts that are just straight-up “OTHER RACE IS INFERIOR, LOLOLOLOL” and they can stay up for multiple hours before the mods delete and/or they get enough reports for autoremoval. Or people rolling with that casual racism in a comment, maybe even something they don’t realise it’s racist, and whether they get told to stop or not.
It’s really just about how quickly people respond to racist posts with a shutdown.
OP is innocently asking “have you encountered racists in the wild here, y’know, cause they’re rife on some other platforms” (heck, twitter is basically just The Racism App)
I’ve been intermittently on Reddit recently and it’s extremely racist too. Like, in a very relaxed way. And I’m talking about frontpage subs
