People of Color

As we build a new social network, it's important to reflect on the mistakes of those that came before.

This is admittedly A Take, but it's genuine and I hope it will be engaged as such.

I noticed the language here refers to "minorities" in regards to race often. I think that should stop. It isn't demographics that are responsible for racial oppression, it's power dynamics and ostensibly anti-racist language should reflect that.

Some might try to point out that in some areas, non-white communities are literally minorities. I only think this is true from the viewpoint of majority-white, European colonialist countries, and that isn't a viewpoint which should be assumed or taken for granted, given they are the oppressors in this situation. Globally, no single race constitutes a majority. Locally, "minorities" quickly become "majorities" if you draw boundaries appropriately—for example, a given group may be 20% of the population of a given city, but in certain neighborhoods of that city they are 60-90% of the residents.

I'm pointing this out because in general decolonization is neglected in "people of color" spaces so that racially oppressed people strive to become equal participants in a racially oppressive system rather than destroying that system altogether. It would be nice if that did not happen here.

cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/299555

Some excerpts I pulled are below.

with extremely few exceptions, especially outside of southern Africa, scholars of continental Africa do not engage the complex ways that race continues to be significant in this postcolonial moment.

The North–sub-Saharan Africa divide shapes continental and global politics (take, for example, the coverage of the “Arab Spring”). … in treating these two geographical areas as distinct—without the associated analysis of the basis of this distinction—we lose sight of the impact of global racial projects in maintaining such a separation

We need to take bold steps to dismantle the established theoretical, methodological, and epistemological structures that continue to impede race analysis on the African continent.

Haggerty suggested the allegation his client was motivated by “hate based on race or ethnic origin” may have been filed in error, something later confirmed by the Calgary Police Service.

“It looks like there was a clerical error with the initial charge, with the incorrect (Criminal Code) subsection,” the service said.

Nwofor is president of Black Lives Matter YYC and has also been active in the community as a supporter of abortion rights.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/572828

The US supreme court has ruled that Native American children can continue to be protected under federal law against being removed from their tribal communities for fostering or adoption, rejecting a petition from a white couple who argued that the provision was a form of racial discrimination.

Ostensibly The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and child pornography, breaking them into binary categories: “ignore,” where they let the post stand, and “delete,” where the imagery is removed for violating community standards.

This is an old article about an older documentary, but I thought it would be interesting to kick up a discussion about how people in Manila (and other places in the Global South) are often the ones left to deal with the worst impacts of social media - including on the moderation side of things.

I think this video is a pretty interesting look into highlighting larger issues of being a minority in an online space. Oftentimes, we never really get the opportunity to represent ourselves online, and this has a bunch of issues. I know, especially in interacting in online spaces where race is never explicitly brought up...

“We are not seen as people who are central to the American story. We are seen as the supporting cast, like this inconsequential supporting actor," Tobar said. He points out that it is Latino labor that keeps the country functioning and that is essential to industries such as construction and agriculture — and that it was largely Latino workers who built the infrastructure of the American southwest.

As he strives to illuminate the Latino experience, he acknowledges that the construct of “Latino“ is artificial and complicated.

In 2021, then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a Democrat, authored a bill to form a task force to examine and develop reparation proposals for the harms of slavery on Black people in California. It is the most ambitious effort in the country to address redress for the impact of slavery on Black people, with task force members saying they want to create a reparations blueprint for the country.

The California Legislature will then have all the power. Lawmakers will review the recommendations and will have the authority to adopt, dismiss or adjust them . Whatever they decide must be approved by both houses before it would be presented to Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign into law.

this is a neat project that was announced last year, and follows in the footsteps of quite a few historical efforts to compile words that are almost exclusively used by minorities (most prominently jive, way back when). Oxford English Dictionary is shooting for it to release in 2025 right now.