Fedi Meta | Defederation Meta | Community Self-Defense
If there is anything to take away from this, it's that...
a) Anti-blackness is often couched in the language of the oppressed, this is intentionally formulated to lower your defenses so they can push a false narrative through. be aware of that kind of manipulation.
b) Perpetrators will never address the grievances, their knee jerk reaction will often-take the shape of making the person bringing the grievances forward look like the aggressor while making themselves look like the victim. This is a big tell, and as an abuse survivor, I can tell you that examples of this are extremely and agonizingly visible to me. If you can detect this, you're already resistant to this kind of toxicity.
c) Being a person of colour does not immunize you from making anti-black actions. If you ever felt a knee-jerk response building up inside you when you are called out by a black person, and/or when called out for anti-blackness, you need to fight it, and start listening.
Black people already face an undue amount of scrutiny everywhere they go as it is, there is no need to add to that hardship by denying them their grievances when we hurt them.
d) If you want to know how to fight it, pay attention. Pay attention to the things people around you say, and pay attention to the effect it has on black and indigenous people outside of your friend circles. You may end up realizing a few unpleasant truths about the way you conduct yourselves.
Treat this not as a trial, but a learning experience. Part of decolonizing your mind is very much about subverting the idea of punishment as justice, and embracing a more forward-thinking kind of justice, one that encourages people to do better.
e) Don't let the focus of the discourse be taken away from the voices of black and indigenous people, and their experiences. Yes, non-black POC and white-passing POC exist, I am an example of an NBPOC, (Though I am not white-passing) and we do have our struggles too. However, we ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT make it a competition between our struggles and that of a black or indigenous person, you will only create more harm for the more marginalized group.
We can absolutely talk about our own struggles, no question about that, but make sure to move on after acknowledgement when talking about black and indigenous issue, and avoid making it about us, okay?
I think we all could stand to learn from the past couple of days. Please, if you follow me, keep me honest. The worst thing you can do to me is enable me when I slip into toxic habits.
re: Fedi Meta | Defederation Meta | Community Self-Defense | Addendum
A couple more thoughts on this...
f) What makes anti-blackness so invisible to everyone outside of those who have personally witnessed and experienced it is the fact that a large part of this abuse is not about what is said, but what pointedly isn't being said.
As an abuse survivor, I am very sensitive to empty spaces that aren't occupied, but hinted at by the words spoken.
So how I figured this out was when I did a chud check earlier today and stumbled into a radioactive user's profile who had decided, thanks to my involvement in the discourse, to make me a target for mockery and trying to weaponize my past against me.
Honestly, I don't care about that. They're free to their opinion. But what I noticed is that there is absolutely no mention of Snouts and PlayVicious anywhere in that discourse, and I find that interesting. Why? PV and Snouts users have basically brought the works to them, and that's why they're turning the snark dial to 11, but they aren't directly mocking or mentioning them.
Then it hit me. They're trying to provoke me into defending myself, and therefore making the meta discourse about me, therefore pushing away any mention of anti-blackness subjects, or any other groups they have abused from their immediate vicinity. This is a clear play at erasure meant to pit the interests of the victims and the people speaking up in defense of them against each other. Quite an insidious move.
The scary part is that I probably wasn't the first one they have tried to do this with.
(tbc)
re: Fedi Meta | Defederation Meta | Community Self-Defense | Addendum
(cont'd)
g) The nature of the scarlet snarks of those folks who tried to provoke me carried with them a distinct sense of diaspora to it, and this is no accident, and I'll tell you why...
So, back when I was a part of AltFurry, we had a special room dedicated to collecting some of the spicier and louder takes from the left that could easily be framed as bad takes.
This special room served a double purpose, it was meant to be an indoctrination tool to endlessly hammer into us how evil and manipulative "the left" really are, but it also did something else, it painted a target...
Seemingly out of nowhere, said mark would suddenly be dogpiled on with abusive rhetoric, and in some cases, mass false-flagging. From the public's perspective, there doesn't seem to be any targeting happening. To them, it looked like the mark had said something to piss off a lot of people out of nowhere, and therefore what the mark had said must be bad. More importantly, it gave a sense of undeserved legitimacy to the dogpile.
Back to the present, what's happening here isn't a dogpile, (I mean, with robust blocking tools carrying more agency on the Fedi, that's kind of impossible.) but the same manufacturing of public opinion is taking place where a bunch of similarly-worded snark from seemingly unconnected users is giving said opinion more legitimacy than it deserves.
More importantly, it does suggest that there may be a central private room from which these bad actors may be operating on, and deciding on what sorts of consensus to take.
Given that one of them made use of the instance's town hall streams to try to harass Snouts users, I really wouldn't put it past them if it turned out that this is the case.
In any case, that's pretty much my thoughts on this whole affair. To be clear, I am fine, I am not worried. My rep is the least of my concern right now, and so should it be the least of your concerns. Focus on staying safe, and also focus on working to keep your communities safe from the aforementioned bad actors.