Beehaw Support

2798 readers

1 users here now

Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our September 2024 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

The Racism which happened in FOSS (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello, so a few days ago now, a lot of Racism happened in FOSS and we were wondering what happened to those that were racist by defending the cultural appropriation which was pointed out, either directly or by ridicule.

Sadly the original post (and thus the comments) is gone, though we saved screenshots of all the offending people and posts.

We would like to know if anything was done about these people as we can see nothing in the modlog.

Thanks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

we were wondering what happened to those that were racist by defending the cultural appropriation

I don't want to dive into the specifics of which words were or were not problematic, but automatically labeling disagreement over an etymological issue of appropriation as racism is, to me, difficult to reason out. Disagreeing with a black person because they're black would obviously be racism. Assuming you understand black culture just as well as a black person because you have some surface-level exposure to it would be racism, sure. Even asserting that black people cannot or do not have any culturally-derived and culturally-important language would be racism.

But I don't think that merely disagreeing about what that language is, especially in cases where there is not a clear origination of a word, is intrinsically racist unto itself. AAE has many words which it itself has adopted from other languages (even non-colonizer ones).

When a clear pattern of use of AAE is at play (which it certainly sounds like is the case for the FOSS creator person, especially with the use of "we be", which as a structure is entirely originating in AAE), disagreement certainly might stem from racism (see: people defending Elvis or Ariana Grande), but that is by no means a sure thing. Many words have muddled histories, or have passed between different dialects of English. This isn't even beginning to get into loan words vs appropriation.

tl; dr - Discussion and disagreement of what constitutes cultural appropriation is not inherently racist.