I'm still manually approving all my follow requests and every week or so I think "are they okay now?" and then nope, some kind of spam account shows up with an AI-generated garbage user profile, AI-generated user photo, and the only toots its made are attempts to get other Mastodon folks to solve CAPTCHAs for it …
Does anyone think this person isn't lying? Like, to an empathetic person who genuinely opposes racism, it should be obvious that if you're talking about something that could be harassment, and it's being done to a Black person, then it's extremely reasonable to conclude that racism is at play.
So, to volunteer to reply to a Black person who's pointing out racist harassment to tell them that, in your opinion, it's harassment that's not "specifically anti-black" would be essentially to tell that Black person that there's nothing specific about them to you. Which is racist.
This doesn't seem complicated to me. Anyway, #BlockList and #Fediblock candidate
@smitten Who would it help to frame this as honesty? Who would it help to frame this as dishonesty? Until we answer those questions, I'm going to hold off on deciding whether either framing is "helpful."
I'm going to leave your comment about criticism of blocklists aside because it's irrelevant.
Of course she COULD be merely ignorant. Do you not think, though, that her protestations of innocence in re: friendliness, remarks about "maybe you just aren't used to my style of conversation," and subsequent invocation of Black friends betrays a mentality that's aware that it's offensive, on some level at least?
I think because I've been online a long time, I've seen a variation of this same conversation play out literally thousands of times, and part of me has a hard time believing that others haven't seen it play out thousands of times too. That's definitely part of why I'm trying to figure this out.
My heart aches for the children who will no longer have access to their local library because some arrogant assholes decided to be offended by books with new ideas and different perspectives.
@compost unlike previous years, we've had a slow-warming spring. The sudden leap from 0C to 20C that happened during a lot of the immediately past years didn't allow much time for germination and pollination.