Texas-based writer and hol.ogra.ph co-admin

Feel free to follow me at @gil@hol.ogra.ph

(he/they)

  • 38 Posts
  • 131 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • What; if anything; are you doing to prevent the instance from becoming an echo chamber?

    Like the linked post discusses, Black queer people are the recipients of a lot of harm. They’re perfectly entitled to a space where they won’t be harassed, doesn’t matter if that space is an echo chamber or not. The moderation and community of that instance can decide for themselves how they want to be structured — it’s not really anyone else’s decision but theirs. If we, as remote users, don’t like how they do things, no one’s forcing us to use their site, federate with them, etc.

    I’ve noticed a lot of black first instances tend to fall victim to the same traps of racism and hatred that instances that center on other races do.

    What exactly do you mean by the phrase “same traps of racism and hatred”? I’ve seen few if any instances centering on other races, so I can’t really establish that there’s any pattern there.



  • Liberals, including some POC, white allies, and white “allies,” are quite keen on representation as diversity. At the end of the day, representation can be superficial and only partially satisfies the goals of social justice. Yes, we — ‘we’ being people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized people — should receive the same opportunities as our privileged counterparts. That’s representation.

    But putting us at the helm of oppressive systems doesn’t end those systems. The point isn’t to have a Black police chief, or a woman CEO, or a queer head of state, etc… I liken this to putting a Pride flag on a nuclear warhead. It’s a symbolic action which, alone, isn’t entirely subversive of the system’s destructive nature. Such representation allows oppressive systems to flourish. We can’t obtain freedom by becoming oppressors ourselves. Justice shouldn’t be the cession of oppressive power to marginalized hands, but the cessation of such power.

    When people see such simple representation as the means to an end, they show their reverence for oppressive power, that:

    • they still have some measure of respect for it and its legitimacy,
    • dismantling power isn’t that important of a mission for them, and
    • they’re fine living with an oppressive system as long as they can go on living their life, have their sensibilities appeased, and still benefit from it

    I’ve gotten a lot of guidance from this quote by Audre Lorde:

    “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

    — Audre Lorde

    These are just my personal feelings, so others may have conflicting thoughts or may want to provide their own insights. I’m not an authority on this or anything, but the main point for me is that I’m against how DEI as a framework is being appropriated to, as Angela Davis said, “guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems.” I see this happening in academia as well as in Hollywood, US politics, and so on, where DEI is being deployed as a smokescreen to give new life to oppression and make it look less harmful.





  • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orghow's your week going, Beehaw
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    11 months ago

    i give my week a 4/5, been busy the past few days trying to set up a Firefish instance with my partner which has been just awesome and i’m super excited to open it up and get people on it! rly inspired by beehaw’s community-building style.

    in less awesome news i’m moving back home at the end of the week and i’m not looking forward to it. moving is so stressful and i don’t want to be back home with my dad either lol.