saying something this edgy does not absolve you of bigotry

edit: for anyone stumbling into the drama, i probably should have elaborated on this post. I am not saying you can’t make fun of white people not being able to eat spicy food or anything, but at some point it becomes self-flagellating. to quote comrade RedQuestionAsker:

It’s good to challenge white supremacy in all of its incarnations at all time. It’s certainly good to refuse to be proud to be white considering what the concept of whiteness is.

It’s another thing to performatively hate yourself in a cocktail of millennial self-deprecation and liberal white guilt. It’s not revolutionary, and it’s probably not good for you.

that is all. comrades just know i dont hate any of you. i’m not trying to start a slapfight. i just saw this as weird performative behavior and wanted to call it out.

  • AlicePraxis [any]
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    9510 months ago

    white people can’t help but fantasize about genocide even when it’s to themselves

    but on a serious note I think for some users it crosses into suicidal ideation and that makes me very uncomfortable

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]
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    7610 months ago

    Personally, I would like to see some of that energy being used for more productive anti-racist actions

    But then again, this a website for little goofy people sometimes and that means that people will be little and goofy sometimes

  • niph [she/her]
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    6310 months ago

    As a poc I hate seeing these jokes because I worry that the poster thinks this is what poc actually want and are “aligning” in some misguided way with us, which just feeds into the “hur hur what if whites were a minority they would be treated just as badly as today’s minorities” nonsense from the chuds

    Did that paragraph make any sense I just woke up

  • On a non edgy note, being white but having class consciousness and being anti racist in cracker town USA sucks. The shit white people say to you that they think is acceptable is insane. It’s like the power and privilege just poisons their souls. Whiteness as an institution/class, whatever it is, legit needs to be destroyed.

  • GaveUp [she/her]
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    10 months ago

    I agree, it’s incredibly self serving and you’re not fooling anybody

    I bet many other POC feel the same as me but I rarely even complain about white people here because I know it’s like 90% white so it’s just an audience that could never empathize with what I’m saying

    • SerLava [he/him]
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      10 months ago

      most people HERE specifically are probably doing it to signify either that it’s funny, or that they aren’t silently brooding, or to make fun of the lemmy people taking it seriously. It’s more like a “har har” than going doe-eyed and slowly nodding like “yeah no, I know, I know, actually my partner and I decided against having children because white supremacy is…”

      ymmv for other groups of people

        • BeamBrain [he/him]
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          910 months ago

          This is exactly what happened to r/pcmasterrace and probably a hundred other examples I’m forgetting.

    • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
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      710 months ago

      I bet many other POC feel the same

      I don’t, I enjoy making white jokes

      I don’t straight up advocate violence though (but I will always upvote a white comrade doing it to themselves, because it’s funny)

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
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    5810 months ago

    They’re not particularly valuable posts

    If hexbears wanna express their frustrations with racism or white supremacy I think it’s fair to give them a platform to vent, but self-flagellation doesn’t really do anything

  • HeavenAndEarth [she/her]
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    5010 months ago

    It’s a shibboleth for this community. Something you use to alienate people who don’t know that, under all those layers of irony, you don’t actually want to kill white people. Also preserves the identity of the community as an edgy/crass leftist space.

    • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
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      10 months ago

      It doesn’t need to be racist to be cringe or unhelpful

      Honestly I thought these jokes were funny 3 or 4 years ago but have we not beat the dead horse enough at this point? It’s just overplayed now

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
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          4610 months ago

          In the last 24 hours one of the biggest of these threads can be distilled down to saying “Skiing is white supremacist for only being in places with cold climates”, “snow is racist”, and “sports that do not specifically cater to me and the place I live are inherently bourgeois.” People just blew up a thread about skiing bitching about the gear being expensive in California, imagining that people would make fun of them for using old gear (most people think retro gear is dope), and saying that it’s problematic because it doesn’t exist in [places where snow does not fall]

          Half of the threads that are ostensibly about hating white people are posted by a couple of users who mostly post these types of threads very clearly as a form of self harm.

          These arguments are not as productive or relevant as you think.

          • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
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            10 months ago

            The same OP of that thread called a biracial person in this thread a “half cracker” to dismiss their discomfort with posts they feel are hateful or self-hateful.

            I think we should be able to recognize that there is a line crossed by some of these posts where they aren’t really jokes anymore, and actually reflect essentialist ideology. that’s a lack of theoretical understanding, and worse, a lack of kindness and empathy for different perspectives.

            • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
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              1310 months ago

              Essentiallist ideology and a lack of theoretical understanding

              this There is one thing, exactly one thing I agree with right wingers about, and that’s that white guilt is liberalism

          • Riffraffintheroom [none/use name]
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            10 months ago

            I don’t think they’re self harming. I read them and all I can see is “please please please please please please like me” with a little “lol jk” to make it go down an easier.

            • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
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              2310 months ago

              There very definitely are some users who clearly post when spiralling and will post a handful of very clearly self-harming posts each month most of which get removed by mods for being buckwild, and maybe one of which from the beginning of the spiral gets left up and then becomes one of these struggle session posts you’re talking about.

        • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
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          2510 months ago

          I don’t think they educate anyone in that. If one finds them funny, one is already well convinced of critiques of white supremacy. They’re jokes, not education.

          I just want more creative jokes tbh

    • blakeus12 [they/them, he/him]OP
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      2010 months ago

      i’m not saying we cant clown on mayos but come on. there’s a certain point where it stops being making fun of white people and crosses into weird self-hatred and white guilt and stops being funny.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
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    4510 months ago

    3 threads greater than 100 comments. Truly, this is one of the weeks where decades happens. I haven’t read any of them.

        • Comp4 [she/her]
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          10 months ago

          My fave struggle sessions are outdoor cats and rockstacking. Absolute evergreens

            • FactuallyUnscrupulou [he/him]
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              510 months ago

              I don’t remember the rock stacking struggle session. What was the Hexbear consensus on that? Personally I knock those rock stacks down when I hike by them.

              • Egon [they/them]
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                10 months ago

                Expert on rehabilitation of water streams made an effort post (and then several very patient replies) about how stacking rocks is harmful.

                Bunch of users freaked out, as if their life depended on rock-stacking. They tried to rules lawyer how close to a water stream you had to be, for it to be bad. They pulled the old “indigenous people do it!!!” defense. They tried to argue that the user was making an individualist argument and thus a capitalist and wrong. They tried to argue that “they just couldn’t see how it was bad, so the expert on water stream rehabilitation is wrong and/or overreacting”. They tried to play it off as “well it’s not bad that i do it” despite having had explained how in this very specific situation, it was actually an individual problem and something they also should not do as individuals.
                People brought up “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but treadmarks” (basic how-to-not-be-a-dickhead-in-nature-etiquette) which these users also then freaked out about.
                A lot of these users were power users on the site and their reaction and subsequent attempts to rules lawyer and then attempts at playing it off as a bit/something silly was very disappointing to see and it therefore still frustrates me, because they behave as if it was totally just everybody overreacting, and not them being beliggerent assholes, for which they should apologise.

                Consensus was that stacking rocks disrupts water streams and does a lot of weird shit for microorganisms, soil, erosion, bugs, that sort of stuff, so touching rocks is bad and stacking them is worse. Can’t recall more than that, but basically: Things in streams are used to rocks not moving about a lot, and they are so used to it, that even just a widdle bit of rock-moving-about done by an individual, is very harmful.
                I have no idea wether they should be knocked over or not, but I would assume so, since the wind probably does it otherwise. I dunno about that, not the expert.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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          10 months ago

          The two big ones in the early days were over transphobic users and veganism. We’ve had a no tolerance policy for transphobia this whole time and that was kind of whiplash for early users. Lots of people with unexamined reactionary views who weren’t used to strict guidelines on how to talk about trans stuff. A lot of them were against pronouns in user profiles.

          But the absolute legends will always be outdoor cats and rock stacking next to rivers