Nesrie makes a legitimate point about the many different ways in which people can be racist, and I don’t disagree. I think the issue is what is the best method to reduce or eliminate those acts/attitudes of racism? For the more overt face-punching type acts, jail and other vigorous enforcement methods are the obvious solutions.
For other types of acts, I definitely don’t want to “overlook and ignore” them, but jail and other harsh enforcement is not going to work long term IMO; too many people would be affected and there would be tidal wave level pushback. I think at a minimum, it has to be called what it is, racism, but to me the big deal is, what next?
I agree with Nesrie that we don’t want to “tolerate” racism, even the more subtle kind she describes. In fact, I think we both want to push back against it, reduce it, eliminate it, etc. But what’s the best way to do that?
And I’m not saying that to delay or evade: I honestly don’t know. Under our current system, if people manage to convince themselves and others that some act is “not really racist” then they proceed as if nothing happened and turn a blind eye to the kinds of subtle nasty stuff Nesrie describes so well. On the other hand, when someone is caught incontrovertibly doing one of the narrowly defined list of acts we considered “really real racism” then they are basically socially and politically shunned, except for the alt-right and fellow travelers, who revel in it. I don’t feel like that system is a very good one: it basically gives us only two responses to racist behavior: either the maximum possible social/political punishment, or none.
In theory, we should be able to come up with proportionate responses that don’t “condone”, “tolerate” or otherwise ignore/let slide racist acts, For example, in the Sarah Jeong thread I think the proportionate response was a reprimand, requiring an apology and putting Ms. Jeong on notice she would be fired if she did it again. Is that tolerating racism? Is that giving her a pass?
That’s where I’m at on this, but I will freely admit that although I can intellectually understand Nesrie’s POV, I can’t really experience it and thus to some degree, I’m just talking out of my ass.
I’m curious - Nesrie do you see any proportionate way to respond to some of the subtle racist incidents you describe? IMO, we can definitely call those acts racist, but then, how do we respond?
This is where it gets dicey. I feel like I’ve pushed heavily to recognize racism for what it is for the most part. No excuses, doesn’t matter how polite it is, or if an educated person uses different lingo than say an ignorant or uneducated racists. You have to try and recognize it no matter how pleasant someone seems. Digging into the source of it, why they’re racist, how racist they are… what kind of history is there and how much of it is hate, ignorance or misunderstanding… that’s fine but it’s too tall of an ask for every minority to do that every time they encounter it. And typically, we don’t respond to every statement, every act, all day long. I don’t run around here calling everyone a racist. For the most part, outside of Social Media, it’s just not happening that way.
As for proportional… some of this stuff is actually illegal. If they were caught doing it, they would not just be fired but here are lawsuits, probably. Housing, loans… but the loan thing, we have proof that it’s still happening, studies that show there are measurable differences for women and minorities when they are put in a room to negotiate prices on loans, differences that largely disappear when it is a website no person to person… but then the excuses roll in about why these groups are so bad at negotiating because the alternative is…bad. But you can’t prove it. How would you prove you got turned down for an apartment because of your race? You’re educated, you know the legal system, how easy is it for you to try and and how much effort would it take, now try and do that with the average person, not college educated, limited time and resources.
But these people, these loan officers, they have friends and families… social pressure, hard pressure. Don’t excuse, don’t laugh it off. I mean we can have an entire conversation about why some groups have more in savings, higher income, move up the ladder socially better than others but having that conversation without acknowledging these other problems makes no sense. If everyone here had to pay a few more thousand dollars in every loan they ever had, ever, how would that affect you?
Social Media is a huge problem It is clearly not well designed for satire, parody, anything else contextual. I am always torn about holding someone’s feet to the fire because i think it was a joke is like an auto response from people who get caught by surprise at the backlash they get while at the same time sometimes it really is a joke. These tech companies largely lack diverse perspectives so they design these things with complete voids in consideration that might not occur if they had someone in the room who said something like… hey if you force real names Blizzard, you realize you’re setting up any woman or person with a not standard English name to be targets… right. You know that right?
So, sadly I don’t have an answer. I find it hard to believe that someone would voice their first and one and only horrifically racist statement at the age of 30 and 40 on Twitter. I suspect if you looked, you’d find a history of it… but at the same time, I don’t know that we need every person who winds up on in the spotlight to have their entire Social Media scrubbed by the people who hate what they stand for or for them to get fired. There’s a line in there somewhere, and we have found it.
For a teach though, who teaches and practices racism, how could you ever trust your kid or someone else’s with someone like that? Even if ten years from now that person had a change of heart, change their POV, wouldn’t it be a tall ask for you to put your five year old in their care?
And on a more personal note, how could I ever accept coffee from a person who posts vile things about races that are not white, someone who has dehumanized entire populations, as if it is not the most abhorrent thing to do as a human being to another human being? Yes, there are people who will reach across the table, take that risk, but that’s not something anyone should ever expect or demand. It’s too tall of an ask. I am bringing this back to the original issue.
Racism wasn’t recognized here by several people, and still isn’t, and it would be a bit of a different discussion if it was recognized, openly acknowledged as such, and then the question was as you call it, more about proportional reaction. I don’t see how anyone can learn anything if that’s not even agreed upon. And I don’t care who they voted for, or if someone puts an alt in front of some label, it was based completely and solely on what they posted on our community board. And the experiences above, I am focus on the person who experienced the racism not as much on the person who committed it even though in order to address it we have to consider the aggressor more than the target.
One upside to the concept of proportionality is that it makes it easier for people to acknowledge racism when it happens, IMO. One of the problems we face is that since any act of racism is considered morally abhorrent, people will often act as if only a tiny group of extremists is capable of racism and act as if the ubiquitous but subtle racism Nesrie describes doesn’t exist. For example, many of the people defending Sarah Jeong want to classify her actions as “not-racist” b/c they fear that if her acts are accepted as racist, then her voice must be completely silenced.
But it’s way more complicated than that.
On the issue of the widespread but not-attention-grabbing type of racism, I think as a society we have certain things we can do and certain things that are beyond are reach, practically speaking.
For example, on teachers, since that is a position of public trust, we can hold those teachers to a much higher standard. That still leaves us with the issue that a 5 year old doesn’t even begin to know how to report that kind of thing but eventually that sort of thing does tend to flow to the parents, so there does need to be a method where that sort of issue can be raised without causing trouble for the parents.
My understanding is that this varies by school district, with some districts being pretty decent and some being downright terrible.
As for the retail example, I’m wondering if that has improved at all in recent years as corporate America has at least in theory become more aware of the image problem dumbshit racist employees can cause. In theory at least, greater economic opportunity for groups suffering discrimination can help at least somewhat in terms of money talking, and businesses wanting to follow the money.
And then there’s the orange-furred elephant in the room: all this well meaning discussion is going to accomplish exactly jack and squat while Trump is the President, while the GOP explicitly embraces racism and the alt-right and while the media remains too damn useless to really call this issue out.
That means winning elections is key and then we get to the issue of how race impacts elections. I don’t agree that the Dems need to shy away from race to avoid scaring or insulting the racists, but I think the outrage needs to be focused on issues that will resonate with people who might actually vote for Dems, or at least refrain from voting for the GOP. For example, imposing a moral purity standard of one drop racism on Sarah Jeong and demanding she be fired and silenced gains exactly 0 votes for the Dems, and loses liberals a pretty interesting voice. On the other hand, being willing to explicitly call out odious policies like family separation as racist does in fact carry some weight. That issue is obvious enough that even the low info voters who are up for grabs can see it, IMO.
There are some things the GOP is going to counter back on hard, that just have to be maintained, like insisting on police reform. There are certain things that we can’t back away from, even if the GOP twists it to push their message. They are always going to twist things, and we have to try to maintain principals. On the other hand, we don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good so we need to focus.
There’s so much racism in the US you could go all day calling out racism so I think you have to target the key areas: racism by people with a lot of power (Trump), racism by people with the power of life and death (police), racism in making policy (see pretty much any GOP “welfare reform” proposal), racism by people with massive audiences (Roseanne). Also, don’t let the right re-purpose anti-racist ideas to damage liberals unless the evidence is overwhelming. The recent attacks by Cernovich and his crew need to be given the credibility they deserve, which is about the size of one of Gordon’s hypothetical sub-quantum violins.
Well I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am not asking anyone on QT3 to try and fix this country or fix the world or solve the ugliness and disease that humanity has nurtured for well beyond recorded history that is racism. We can talk about it, struggling with, try to understand it and talk about it some more, maybe even learn to approach new situations different and process old ones in ways what we hadn’t thought of before.
What I am asking for, is when someone comes here, enters our community and starts talking about dividing groups of people based on physical characteristics, where they were born, basically shit they don’t have control of, no matter how much false politeness they sell, or how many people had tea or coffee or anything else with them… that we say no, it’s not okay here. And if they bounce from one topic to another targeting some of the few minorities on the board, asking if they can handle it, maybe, just maybe the benefit of doubt should actual shift towards the people who have been here for years and not the person who joined yesterday.
No one wants to admit someone they know and like is racist, not members of our family, friends or even colleagues. It’s ugly, and to do so tarnishes and makes a part of that person seem ugly whereas before that wasn’t the case and it doesn’t seem right now. Except when we put that much emphasis on the person making that statements… how much is left for the person receiving it?
I don’t know what kind of community was is intended or wanted, or heck we even argued not too long ago if this was even a community at all. There was turmoil here, and the expense of that was, well it was burden not equally understood or shared by everyone.
I come back here a month later, scroll down past 400 posts of 98% white men posturing at white men, and I see this.
[QT3 passive aggressive mode engaged.] There’s a thread here where white transplants moving to Portland bitch about how there’s no diversity here. It was pointed out that we’ve got plenty of Somalis, every kind of Asian, etc. And everyone agreed that they don’t really count as diversity. One might expect that Oregonians would stick up for their neighbors. I didn’t because nobody here gives a shit about my opinion, but it’s funny that users here whose opinions matter here kept their mouths shut too. But then it’s just asians and Muslims that we’re talking about, nobody who actually matters. [bitchy QT3-style personal attack mode disengaged]
There’s something quite strange about QT3 that I didn’t pick up on in the beginning but became more obvious over time. There’s virtually nobody here who wasn’t born in an anglophone first world country. It didn’t really hit me at first, but then there’s these subtle things that creep out at you. Like communism being treated as some kind of a joke or a meme, not something that puts a fucking mine in your road to blow up on your bus on the commute every morning. And the more I think about it, the more I realize how this bizarre community is. You don’t represent my country, you don’t represent my neighborhood. How in the fuck did you people get so white?
To (over) explain further for those who don’t find it obvious: back in the day, only (relatively) rich (mostly) white (mostly) American nerds used the Internet to chat about gaming, because only (relatively) rich (mostly) white (mostly) American nerds had the prerequisites of money to blow on an expensive hobby, the knowledge required to do so (ah, the days of when gaming chat was largely a discussion of memory managers!) and access to the Internet.
This community started out on Usenet, talking about a fairly niche topic (strategy games) and then migrated to the Web when Usenet died out as a place of discussion.
Just for a little better clarification of the origins of Qt3… at the beginning it was largely a group of the writers for various magazines and websites here on the forum; specifically Computer Games Strategy Plus and Computer Gaming World with a smattering of others.
It definitely had some crossover with the newsgroups, and the fans of the writers who were here and it grew from there. Was it majority white and male? Yes.
I saw a post was removed so I won’t reply to that but…
As othershave said, this is an English speaking gaming board. So the participants are largely white men, and I also think it’s largely USA, but clearly there are others from other countries too. I have actually looked up several terms, phrases and ideas when I realized there are differences in meaning between something said here and say the same thing in the UK.
As for diversity in Portland, compared to other large cities, Portland isn’t very diverse, but of course that doesn’t mean non-white populations in Portland right now don’t count. It’s just weird up there… like the world view they kind of push, the liberal tilt but at the same time the same person drinking and bragging about the various parts of world their coffee came from and then complaining about a brown person two minutes later (gross exaggeration here, mostly).
I remember talking about Portland, but I don’t know if I was part of that specific conversation or not. I’m sorry if I was part of any impression that some groups don’t count in some way as others do. I’ve been trying to be conscious of that when discussing ethnicity differences to racial differences too.
Thank you. I kind of tried to avoid this topic a bit, but I felt I needed to try at least one more time after the MIA piece. These are emotionally charged topics for me; they just are, but I tried hard not to let those chaotic emotions return too quickly.
I know we did have some conversation, but may have been another thread.
However, as the central figure in that thread, I found the comments about lack of diversity extremely puzzling, and said so. It didn’t match my experience at all. Granted, it may be as much the areas I travel in, but there is a very large and diverse population I interact with on a daily basis here. And I said as much.
So I really don’t know what @Miguk is on about. When talking about diverse populations I definitely noted and acknowledge the breadth of communities here. It’s cool to see Japanese, Polynesian, Indian, Chinese, Somali (admittedly an uncertain classification on my end, I’m not going to random people on the train ‘hey where are you from’), Native American and more communities represented. I see them at work, I see them on the trains, I see them in the restaurants open around me.
I believe Portland is one of the 10th fast growing cities right now. The population there could easily be drastically changing, but when they had the nasty white supremacy clashes, the horrific deaths on the train, and just the local presence of those hate groups, it didn’t really surprise me or anyone else who has been in Oregon, though not living in Portland, because that stuff and the push back to diversity, has a history and been there for years. The last decade or so seems to have made Portland a go to place so that will certainly start shifting things and maybe already has.
I am skeptical the black population is growing, within the city, but maybe it is too. Again the last few years, it’s really growing.
Fair and while assuming someone’s ethnicity or origin or whatever is a bad idea in a lot of contexts, my experience is that it’s not too tough to have a decent guess at whether someone is of Somali descent just from their features, plus culturally they tend to still be pretty committed to their traditions (at least here) so dress is often a pretty obvious one too.
For purposes of eyeballing diversity on the train or whatever, that’s good enough for me.
If I weren’t so stuck in trying to make as much money as I can to pay off our massive debt load while raising two small kids, I’d get involved with programs and activism aimed at understanding why and working toward desegregating Minneapolis. It’s reasonably diverse inside the city itself by pure numbers, but it’s crazy segregated. The Somalis live on the West Bank, the multi-generation African-Americans up in North and just south of the freeway, the natives along Cedar-Riverside, the Mexicans down East Lake. There’s so much we could do to make sure everyone has the opportunities they deserve, but there’s a tendency to say “but we built a light rail and raised the minimum wage, what else can we do?” So much! So much we could do.
Indeed, it’s hard to miss for sure. I’ve seen a number of women in Muslim attire, but with a clearly African inspired pattern. The African Islamic world is so distinct in many fascinating ways. It’s so much more colorful, generally, than what you see on the Arabian Peninsula.
On one occasion it was a mother with her two children, and I spent half the ride picking up the matchbox cars the son kept dropping (it was the seats at the front facing each other). The mother looked so embarrassed when her son accidentally bounced the car off his foot under my seat. And as a parent, I get it ;)
Having to rely on the bus and trains certainly gave me a different perspective on the city than I might otherwise have had.
I’ve been looking at topics for a possible Forgotten History podcast ive been in various stages of planning, and the Swahili Coast and the various Sultanates of Somalia are super interesting.
