Honestly "it's not racism unless there are slurs" is white-people respectability politics 🤷♀️
racism, fedi & other meta, abuse ment
White people look down on saying slurs and sharing overtly dehumanizing images not because they are violent and harmful to racialized people (though of course they are, and should not be acceptable in any circumstance--and plenty of popular white people fail even that test 
) but because these are considered uncouth, lowbrow behaviors. That's why there was a strong consensus about kicking Gab off the fedi but it's hugely controversial and even dangerous to say out loud that leftist instances which harass Black and Indigenous users on ridiculous pretexts are being shitty. Even saying you're going to defederate from such an instance invites resentment, which is completely ridiculous because you do NOT under any circumstance have the right to other people's company against their will, like what the fuck is the matter with you.
re: racism, fedi & other meta, abuse ment
@ljwrites They can't even argue that anymore since I've been seeing a lot of instances of people like Noelle and Milly, going to twitter to harass PoC and call them not-quite-slurs-but-are -actually-if-you-think-about-it-for-5-seconds. And they do it in, you know, in spaces, where they think people like me won't see them doing that shit, or if they think we're too stupid to think we won't pick up on their black and indigenous -misic rhetoric just because they didn't use the "no no words"
re: racism, fedi & other meta, abuse ment
@FreyaManibrandr they can't be that bad because they're leftist and don't say slurs uwu