In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like “maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don’t see it on Lemmy.” Then again, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don’t see racism even when they’re looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. … but that wasn’t really the thrust of that discussion.

So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you’ve seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!

  • ilovecheese@feddit.uk
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    4 months ago

    Absolutely we all have blind spots, I just think OP’s blind spot is addressing ‘white people’ like none of us live with, and around many cultures, not just races.

    If someone were to address my local Polish or Bangladeshi or Muslim or whatever community the same way OP is addressing ‘white people’ in this post I would call it borderline racist and in fact it would fit in OP’s original ‘don’t do’ list.

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yes, but context matters. Not that I have any statistics, but I would assume the Fediverse as a whole is predominantly white to an almost absurd degree. Had someone who represents a very small minority in Bangladesh turned to the Bangladeshi people to adress concerns of racism they experience all over Bangladesh from Bangladeshi people I would hardly call that controversial.