This article is trash, and a lie that white parents in the suburbs tell themselves.

Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm:

@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I think you're being too reductive. These kids don't start out fascist.

I'm not trying to give them excuses. They are making conscious choices based on the media that's presented to them.

If we get out of this, we're going to have to seriously grapple with the challenge to society of giving anyone with an internet connection unfettered access to our brains.

Fifi Lamoura

@tob If the kids were brought up to be anti-racist they'd think racism is stupid. If they'd been brought up to treat girls as equals they'd treat girls as equals and think sexism is stupid. These are values that are learned at home. @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland

Tim Smith

@fifilamoura @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I don’t think it’s that simple. I have a 9 year old that I’ve spent 9 years trying to do the right thing but he still gets Tate Jr content pushed to him and his friends online. We’ve had to have a lot of conversations about what he repeats because he doesn’t even realize that it’s racist and sexist dog whistles. It’s a full time job. Social media absolutely targets kids and subtly pushes this bullshit on them

mekka okereke :verified:

@tas50 @fifilamoura @tob @wendinoakland

Were talking about two different things.

1) Does your kid ever see this stuff?

2) Does your kid internalize this stuff and repeat the hate out into the world?

How often does your 9 year old interact with positive Black men role models? Weekly? Monthly? Are there 5 or 6 Black men that are part of your close community? I'm guessing no.

Because that's probably the easiest way to innoculate your kid from thinking that Tate is cool.

1/N

CTraceyWrites

@mekkaokereke
100% I grew up in a very white town in the Hudson Valley. I remember hearing stories about non-white families hey hazed out of town just a few years before my generation. We had less than ten non-white families in my high school. There were a lot of racist jokes being thrown around all the time.
I hate even thinking back on some of it because I was definitely part of the problem when I was a kid. I am glad that my parents made sure I got involved in a lot of stuff outside my hometown because that helped me realize I had a lot of shit to unlearn and unpack. I was also fortunate to have friends who wouldn't hesitate to call out any bullshit. I've definitely come a long way from that, but my town has not.
I went down recently for an event in town and the racism is almost palpable. There are some things I see that make me happy things are improving. Like when I drove by one day when school was letting out and just the sheer number of poc kids that came running out made me so happy. But then the older people in town do things like hold blue lives matter rallies and shit.
Racism in the Hudson Valley is and has been a major problem. There are some signs of improvement, but there's also been a lot of "doubling down" that is really hard to tell if, overall, things are trending better or worse.

Jon

Innoculation is a great metaphor here. One useful way of looking at facism, misogyny, nativism, transphobia etc are as diseases that we're all susceptible to, to a greater or lesser extent. Of course it's not an exact model -- in particular unlike impersonal diseases that happen to us, bigotry is a choice, so I'm not absolving anybody from personal responsibility. But it's still useful.

From a public health perspective, the people in power collectively benefit from the pervasiveness of these diseases. So they refuse to do the obvious things to reduce the conditions for these diseases to spread. Instead, they actively try to spread them.

In aid of this they've gotten extremely good at targeting propaganda to leverage and magnify existing bigotry. It's not just social media, it's also Fox News, talk radio and podcasts, Sinclair media, the so-called "liberal" media, etc etc etc -- and their interactions, using social media to promote propagnda from other media.

Like all public health issues, we really need collective solutions ... but that's not on the table, in the short term. What we can do, individualy and as part of families and organizations, is to try to inocculate ourselves and others against this to some extent.

I agree with Mekka that Black parents are generally a lot more effective at inocculating their kids against the white manosphere -- and other forms of racism -- than white parents. White people collectively need to get better at innoculating white people against racism: themselves, their families and friend groups, their colleagues, and to the extent they have influence their orgnaizations.

Including here on the fediverse, by the way!

Demian

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke great resource Jon! Thanks for putting together!

inquiline

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke
The white nonsense bot is one of my favorite things on here. It's not only good to just see its posts, but I occasionally drop them in replies when such a reply is warranted.

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@jdp23 I had to lookup what “anti-black” actually meant because, as a white guy who is striving to be non-racist, I honestly still had no idea what it meant specifically…

“Anti-black racism is the specific exclusion and prejudice against people visibly (or perceived to be) of African descent – what most of us would commonly call black people,’ says senior policy officer Kim McIntosh.

Kim says anti-blackness goes beyond bad feelings, negative attitudes or stereotypes.

‘Anti-black racism is a toxic cocktail that mixes these beliefs with how people with power make decisions, how government policies are made, or how state services are delivered,’ she adds. ‘It prevents us from enjoying or exercising fundamental freedoms on an equal footing – like the freedom to live and work free from discrimination or abuse.’”

https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/20/what-is-anti-blackness-12279678/

jack

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke Treating knife crime as a quasi-epidemic was remarkably effective in Scotland. It's really exciting to consider that other social ills could be treated the same way!

Jon

@[email protected] that's a really good article, thanks! wow i can't believe that it's in Metro of all places. I'll add a link to it article in the first footnote.

I too am a white guy striving to be anti-racist (not just non-racist) ... I went with the definition

Anti-Blackness – beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people across the world

because it's got academic cred. I double-checked it with a couple of Black experts and they thought it was solid.

Jon

@[email protected] glad it's useful ... and my pleasure! Ally work FTW

Jon

@[email protected] @[email protected] yeah @[email protected] and I had a lot of fun going over the various posts to figure out which one would work best for this article. so many good choices!

Jon

Yeah. Another good metaphor for the information aspects is toxicity and pollution - https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21020284/whitney-phillips-fake-news-misinformation-disinformation-you-are-here-book-interview is a good intro to Whitney Phillips' work on that front.

Unfortunately, "could be treated" is a lot different from "are being treated", but fedi is as well placed as anybody to change that. Which doesn't mean it'll happen but still.

@[email protected] @[email protected]