Insults Policy

[sanguinity]

Thank you, everyone, for your extensive input on the discussion post, as well as your pms and emails. I am very glad that I asked for input: there were indeed issues that I didn't understand well, and more dangerous, issues that I didn't even know to consider. I regret, however, that this conversation was so painful for many, and I regret further that some left the comm during it. There are things that I learned about modding during this and would do differently next time; I'll get into that later in the post.

All three moderators have had input into and signed off on this post.

Before we get into policy-setting, let me address some concerns that cropped up in comments and pms:

• We will not have a different set of rules for white and poc members. First, such a rule would throw the door wide open to identity policing, which is a place we really don't want to go. Second, white/poc is a false binary, and especially so if one presumes that everyone has a stable and universal position in that imaginary binary. We negotiate that false binary as best we can with respect to authors -- see the "who's poc?" tag, especially the comments of those posts, for discussion -- but to have binary rules binding members where in fact no binary exists would create a host of problems, both for members and mods.
  
  

  We are, as always, going to continue to ask that people be mindful of where they fit in the lattice of privileges and oppressions and to attempt to act honestly and responsibly with respect to that position. There will undoubtedly be conversations about responsibilities and constraints that go with different privileges. But there will be no formal, differential rules based on racial identity.
  
  

• There were some concerns in the pms about whether the comm can serve both white people who are here for self-education/recalibration and poc who are here for social refuge from a white-dominated book world. (Note, please: not everyone here for self-ed is white. Additionally, I'm not entirely sure that everyone who is here for social refuge is poc.)
  
  

  Yes, I think we can serve both, if imperfectly. More to the point, I think we have been. From what I have seen, both have been happening here since the early days of the comm. Yes, serving both requires mindfulness and attention, and we will probably never do a perfect job at it. But this comm has served all three functions in the past -- self-ed, countering systemic bias, and social refuge -- and the mod team is committed to continuing to serve all three.
  
  

• Ableism, people. There was both minimization and snark about ableism in the comments of the discussion post. As a community, we've been inconsistent about paying attention to ableism, and I would very much like to see us improve. (And yes, the need for improvement goes for me as a mod, as well.) So two things to begin with.
  
  

  First, have a link to the Ableist Word Profile archive from FWD. That link is not to be treated as a bible: while there is wide consensus around some words, there is not consensus around others. Also, as FWD points out in their expanded introduction to the Ableist Word Profile, this is a series about language, origins, and ideas: becoming conversant with the ideas that make these words problematic is far, far more useful than simply treating this archive as a "Thou Shall Not Use" checklist.
  
  

  Second, I'm going to put up a poc disability/ableism recommendations post. We'll ask for recs for books and blogs both, following the suggestion in "Why writing about language isn't enough" concerning formal publishing sometimes being an obstacle to getting heard.
  
  

  If you've got suggestions about what else we should be doing, sing out in the comments, please.
  
  

• ETA: Harassment and racialized dynamics in the discussion post. Before I turned anonymous commenting off, poc members (and only poc members) were being directly and explicitly harassed by anons. Additionally, there were patterns in the discussion that are racialized, at least in part, and which add up to de facto harassment when multiplied across many commenters.
  
  

  Please note that I am focusing on the /4chan/ comment in the link not because I think it is the single worst comment in the entire set of threads -- I don't. (Those would be the anonymous comments. A "greatest hits" list would also include the kinds of comments that we are setting explicit policy against, below.) I am mentioning the /4chan/ comment because the patterns of discussion around that comment illustrate some of the racialized dynamics that were in play throughout the discussion post.
  
  

  As of now, we have no policy recommendations around those patterns, other than to try to interrupt them when we see them.

So, policy.

Between Members

1. Insulting or mocking other members is generally not okay. Comments that chill people's willingness to review or discuss a book, and which do so without providing counterbalancing value to the community or the purposes it serves, will be disallowed.
   
   

   • Calling someone out for kyriarchical ideas/language/actions, even snarkily, is not an insult and is always permitted. (This would be a case of "counterbalancing value", see above.) We are not going to require someone who just ran facefirst into something personally demeaning to be patient about explaining why it is demeaning or how they would like you to please stop. If they wish to show you patience, that's their choice. Yes, in the best of all possible worlds, we would hope to run a comm where members have found it worth their while to show each other patience, because they have found that the other members have first earned it. But that is a wholly different thing than saying that anyone is automatically owed patience over a kyriarchal affront, simply for being here.
     
     

   • Leave space in your conversations, tacitly or explicitly, for other members to find or reject value in a given book. That you found a book to be totally without merit does not mean that the book cannot have value for someone else, and vice versa: reasonable, worthy people can entirely disagree on a given book. Consequently, liking or disliking a book or genre does not make one member a better person than another. Do not imply that it does.
     
     

   • Because there are so many subjective issues at play here (the questions of what is chilling and what constitutes counterbalancing value is subjective; similarly, what is an insult and what is pointed snark is subjective), the mod team may choose to freeze a thread and mediate, rather than use a "zero-tolerance" disciplinarian approach.

   
   
   

2. Be as mindful as possible of other people's triggers. This is where things get sticky, because sometimes different accessiblity needs are in tension or outright conflict with each other. Remember that there are common triggers on both sides of the insults/civility issue. Tone policing (or things that smack of it) can be triggery. The particular language used in calling someone out can be triggery. Be aware that both parties in any given conversation may have relevant triggers or mental health considerations. Also, remember that there can be more issues at play than simply triggers: after all, people with triggers can still need calling out on kyriarchal issues.
   
   

3. If you need to know how another comm member identifies, go through the mods. This is to create space for those still working through how they choose to identify and to prevent identity policing among members. There are legitimate reasons to ask after someone's racial identity -- to interrupt whitesplaining, for example -- but have the moderators do the asking.
   

Toward Authors

Insults directed toward authors are permitted, but with caveats.

As to why we are permitting insults toward authors (quoted without attribution, because it was in a pm):

...policing reactions to the author for writing something that offends you sounds disturbingly delegitimizing of that offense. In a community that's all about listening to the (written) voices of POC, potentially delegitimizing an offended POC seems to go against the very mission of the forum itself.

What zie said. There are additional strong arguments for permitting "uncivil" discourse (f'rex, "uncivil" discourse as a necessary tool for social change), but the quote above speaks to the heart of the community's purpose. Note, please, that this is our reasoning for not constraining how chromatic and non-white members may speak of authors on this comm. There is broad consensus across the community that white members should not be leveling personal attacks against authors here.

Several of you have argued convincingly that permitting insults to authors impairs another fundamental purpose of the community: getting people to read more books by authors of color, and/or counterbalancing systemic biases that authors of color are subject to. Hence the following caveats. The first two are outright rules; the third is a constellation of factors that requires your best judgment.

1. Cut and use a trigger warning on posts that direct insults at an author, since insults directed against a third party can be triggery for emotional or verbal abuse. The trigger warning should be in both the cut title and the body of the post, because direct links and community feeds bypass cuts and cut-text.
   
   

2. Kyriarchal insults are disallowed.
   
   

   Anything that uses racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, fatphobic, ageist, classist, etc. slurs or ideas is definitely kyriarchal and disallowed.
   
   

   Some insults are kyriarchal in a specific geographic or demographic context: that is, some comm members will think they are kyriarchal, and some won't. If someone says to you that a certain piece of language is kyriarchal, show them the respect of taking them at their word and changing it. They may not be able to explain to your satisfaction why it's kyriarchal: sometimes we know more than we can tell someone else; alternatively, "getting it" may require experiential knowledge you don't have. Even if someone cannot explain it to your satisfaction, revise your language anyway. (More properly, you should revise first and ask for explanation second.) If you feel strongly that your language wasn't kyriarchal and should be allowed to stand, you can ask the mods for a ruling, but we'll be using this paragraph ourselves: after all, no one gave us the Great And Definitive Reference Book of All Kyriarchal Insults Ever, either.
   
   

3. Anyone who is contemplating directing insults at authors should consider the following strong cautions:
   
   

   • People of color are often forced to spend disproportionate energy justifying their personal worth as humans, or defending their right to basic respect; personal insults can directly or indirectly contribute to that disproportionate burden.

     [The personal attack on an author brings to mind] resonances to how race and gender hierarchies ensure that, as women of color, we have to constantly prove that we are worthy of being treated with respect, to how we are often personally attacked when we say or do something that others disagree with (and by this I mean, not just having our words and actions attacked -- which might or might not be warranted -- but attacking our intrinsic worth as human beings, as deserving the least modicum of respect).
     (color_blue, source)

     How disproportionate the systemic disrespect that an author is subject to depends in part on an author's other, intersectional identities and zir local context (f'rex, living in a majority-white country generates different pressures than living in a majority-poc country). The farther removed you are from the author's local context and intersectional identities, the more difficult it will be for you to judge that disproportion accurately.
     
     

   • This community, as well as many of the authors reviewed here, is subject to an omnipresent white gaze that revels in intra-poc conflict. Additionally, that white gaze is adept at turning intra-poc conflict to its own purposes. Again, the greater your distance in geography or identity from an author, the more difficult it will be for you to judge how your words may be used against an author or community, and the more caution you should show.
     
     

   • Locking a post to members-only (friends-only) may reduce some of the hazards with respect to the above two points.

Finally, because there are things in this policy proposal that will have to be modded according to our best judgment, you deserve to know what I learned about modding and what would be different in the future.

The biggest change is that we're going to ask for more mods. There was only one mod on deck for this, and that was too few. (carenejeans was unavailable; oyceter had to recuse herself because of personal friendships.) I hit my emotional, cognitive, and time limits during the half-week that the policy discussion post was racking up eighty comments a day, and as a consequence, several things that should have gotten interrupted in those comment threads, didn't. I can only offer my apologies, and say that we'll try to reduce the possibility of getting caught short-handed like that again.

(Please note that we are not asking for mods in this post -- this post is well into tl;dr territory as it is.)

More personally, I learned that as a mod I need to be a lot more transparent, a lot earlier, and that transparency includes a willingness to say, "I don't know yet; this is why I don't know; this is what I need to find out before I'll know." Because I failed to do that early on, the issue of treatment of other comm members became entangled with whether it is permissible to insult an author, and as a result, this discussion became much, much more charged than it had to be.

As to what won't change: the bit where I ask people to talk to me and tell me what they think is happening, and what they think I should be considering. That's pretty fundamental to who I am, and you will continue to see that in situations where I don't have a precedent to work from, or suspect that I don't understand enough about what is happening.


And that's about what we have. Comments on the previous discussion post are now locked; any commentary you have should go on this post. If there is anything that seems unworkable, confusing, or just plain unacceptable in the policy laid out above, we want to know.

Thank you again to everyone for your input thus far. It is very, very clear that many of you, posters and lurkers alike, care deeply about the comm and its objectives. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the time and energy you all devoted to telling me what you want from and for the comm.

Comments

[lovefromgirl.livejournal.com]

This post in general is pretty awesome, but especially:

Also, as FWD points out in their expanded introduction to the Ableist Word Profile, this is a series about language, origins, and ideas: becoming conversant with the ideas that make these words problematic is far, far more useful than simply treating this archive as a "Thou Shall Not Use" checklist.

Thank you for this. Nothing drives me up a wall faster than a knee-jerk insistence that I not use a word (especially in reference to my own disabilities) without examining any of the context. Oh, lord, I'm getting more postmodern by the day. *thwaps self*

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This has not been an easy situation, and I really appreciate your efforts to negotiate this.

[pauraque]

I'm going to put up a poc disability/ableism recommendations post.

I am excited about this.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

As ever, I support your modding, but I'm uncomfortable that there's no mention of the racialised harassment both winterfox and myself were subjected to as a direct result of events in this com. While, in this case, I'm willing to read that as an assumption of community consensus that racialised insults and the social phenomenon of white women's tears are Bad Things, it disturbs me that, out of all the subjects covered above, these actual instances of racism aren't explicitly addressed or even acknowledged.

[neo-prodigy.livejournal.com]

THIS!!!!!!

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

are you referring to the anon gossip thread? i saw that and was pretty grossed out. i'm assuming there was some overlap between this comm and that one.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Erm, no, and I'm not sure what you mean, although there was a previous incident in another poc-oriented com in which members were gossiping about flocked com posts at an anon meme so I'm going to guess you mean something similar (minus the flock-breaking).

I'm most concerned about comments in this com (anon and otherwise).

[witchsistah.livejournal.com]

Now you know your darkie bitch fee fees never count! Especially not when faced with White folks' butthurt.

[sanguinity]

Thank you for bringing this up. I shouldn't have presumed that the comm has a shared understanding of the racialized aspects of those comment threads, nor should I presume that new members of the comm would find the threads that name it. Yes, it needs recapping.

I understood at least three racialized dynamics coming into play in those threads: racialized norms of "proper" behavior, racialized knowledge sets, and racialized perceptual/selection biases.

And because this protest came up very strongly in the pms: my saying that these are racialized issues is not the same as saying that "white people believe this; poc believe this". Please note that poc weighed in on both "sides" of this discussion. However, before I kicked the policy question of propriety/civility/insults up to community-wide discussion, there were very definite racial patterns in who was asking for moderator intervention and who was expressing approval of Winterfox's posts. That pattern was not random.

Also not random: who got the worst of the anon(s) attentions. (All anon comments were automatically screened. As the original poster, I saw all anon comments; everyone else only saw the ones directed at them personally.) It is unclear to me how many anons there were, let alone much of anything else about the individuals doing it. However, taken in aggregate, the anon comments directed at white members had a conversational tone, while the anon comments directed at woc were deliberately aggressive, insulting, and inflammatory. Not random.

So, the racialized behaviors I recognized to be at play:

Racialized notions of "proper" behavior: as explained here and here, the sense of what is "not done" is cultural, and some of those cultural differences are also racialized.

Racialized knowledge sets came up in the dispute over what rachelmanija's 4chan comment meant. I'm guessing that if I were to do a poll to discover who thought of 4chan as "that place where people are rude and mean" and who thought of 4chan as "that place where they take pride in their racism, and even believe that their racism sets them a notch above all other internet gathering places," you'd find a racial skew in the answers. Thus, the question of whether rachelmanija crossed a line, what line, and how badly she crossed it, becomes a racialized one.

(Please, I am not interested in all y'all conducting an impromptu poll in comments on who knew what about 4chan. I am also not interested in debating which way rachelmanija's comment should most properly -- ah, that word again! -- be read. The phenomenon at issue is broader than that comment: that it is possible to be unaware of the racial implications of a comment, and that this unawareness happens with fair frequency and easily goes unrecognized by many, that is a racialized phenomenon, and it should be giving the members here pause.)

Additionally, there are racial biases in who is perceived to be (or remembered to be) disruptive or a problem. Even in threads and comments where a member acknowledged that rachelmanija's 4chan comment qualified as an insult and was thus within scope of the discussion, there was a disturbing tendency to reframe the conversation as if winterfox was the only member whose behavior was within the scope of the discussion.

Take all three of those racialized phenomenon together, let them interact, and then accumulate them across multiple people, and you've got de facto racialized harassment of poc.

And I do want to remind everyone here about the anon comments, please, even though you didn't see them: some of the harassment that poc members received was explicit and intentional, and yes, it was racialized.

...as of now, this is how the mod team understands what was going on in those threads. Unfortunately, we don't yet have any specific policy suggestions for dealing with it, other than to be on the lookout for those kinds of patterns, and try to interrupt them as they arise.

[kate_nepveu]

This is a statement for the record only, for two reasons:

1) I have no expectation of changing anyone's mind as things stand;
2) I do not have the resources to engage in discussions similar to the ones that this comm has seen recently.

Of the identifiable comments in the recent discussions, the only one you see fit to cite as a problem, and specifically a racialized one, is "This isn't 4chan." That is a mod decision that removes my confidence in the moderators' approach toward the discussions this comm is now hosting and my willingness to engage in such discussions.

I respect the work you have put into this issue, but I will be moving this comm from watched to tracked status, in order to keep an eye out for book recommendations without reading or engaging in the discussions.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

1) I have no expectation of changing anyone's mind as things stand;

1. If you can't and/or won't engage with other people then that's inevitable, yes.

2) I do not have the resources to engage in discussions similar to the ones that this comm has seen recently.

Of the identifiable comments in the recent discussions, the only one you see fit to cite as a problem, and specifically a racialized one, is "This isn't 4chan."

2. Well, we could go through ALL the harrassment and abuse stemming from rachelmanija's comment and my extremely polite calling out but I suspect you're not the only one who doesn't have "the resources to engage in discussions", perhaps especially those of us who were harrassed and abused (in specifically racialised ways) and could expect more of the same.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Thank you for making this effort.

It would probably be appropriate to link your comment prominently from the main body of this post, although as most readers will already have read the above post, and moved on, this acknowledgement of the racialised aspects of the previous discussions would still remain notably less visible (that's not a criticism, merely an observation on how the lj post/comment/feed/read process works).

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

And I do want to remind everyone here about the anon comments, please, even though you didn't see them: some of the harassment that poc members received was explicit and intentional, and yes, it was racialized.

This might be something worth editing to add to the main post, if it fits somewhere. I didn't realize until now that there were anon comments (I guess I thought they'd been turned off entirely?).

[sanguinity]

I turned them off part way through the initial discussion, after someone(s) started using them to harass winterfox and spiralsheep.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I remember you turning them off; I guess I hadn't realized the extent of them, since I never saw them? Anyway, this does seem important and I'd hate to see it get lost in the comments.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

...there was a disturbing tendency to reframe the conversation as if winterfox was the only member whose behavior was within the scope of the discussion...

I went back and re-read the post, thought about it, and I'd like to apologize for my part in that.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. I wasn't able to participate in the discussion as much as I would have liked, due to personal problems occurring at the same time, but this seems like a reasonable solution to me.

[horace-hamster.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this -- for taking the time to deal with the problem and to devise an equitable solution. Y'all are a classy lot ;-)

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the work you put into this.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for the hard work.

I should note that I thought I was paying fairly close attention to the conversation, and had no idea that the anon comments were so bad. My main reaction, when they were mentioned, was a sort of vague surprise that they were on at all, and an assumption that they got turned off proactively rather than reactively.

I've noticed anon commenting is still off; it might be worth making a new post about that, and saying why, so that people who have not gone back to read the updates to this post or aren't tracking this post know about it.