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.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-07-14 07:17 am (UTC)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
(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
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.