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!

  • helenslunchEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    downvoting can also be used as a weapon to try to bury discussions of racism (this thread btw is at -17, the previous one is at -70).

    This is not “weaponization”, this is downvotes being used for their intended purpose: to hide bad content (ie: incessant race-baiting). Some people don’t like downvotes, and some instances/communities don’t allow them. Maybe try filling those with your bad content instead and you’ll have better luck.

    are all consistent with an environment where reactions to somebody bringing up race are hostile.

    This isn’t about you “bringing up race”, this is about you trying to squeeze racism from a stone.

    Almost nobody is challenging these comments

    Maybe take that as a sign that almost everybody disagrees with you, and maybe this is not the place for you.