Beehaw Support

In my opinion purposefully misinterpreting “unfortunate” to mean “white people not welcome” is a perfect representation of why WHY diversity matters.

it's a good indicator we are going to continue to ask that question on the survey forever, for what that's worth. very clearly a "the beatings will continue until morale improves" question because oh god, some of the responses here

Thank you for writing this!

As a straight white male it's a bit hard to feel your words carry any weight in discussions like this.

I'm here trying to be an ally to ant decent human being who might feel they need one! <3

Beeple is also an amazing 3d digital artist

What is 'white' exactly and why is it unfortunate?

'White' is an artificially constructed privileged racial caste predicated on and necessitating anti-Black violence.

It is a legal and social ingroup whose borders expand and contract as needed to preserve itself.

Its over representation is "unfortunate" in so far as any lack of diversity-of-experience will make for a less rich community for all involved, but specifically having membership skew towards the more privileged members of a hierarchy can damage that community by having it tend toward obviousness of how its own privileges and position in society can affect its worldview.

A member from the community might, for example, say they "don't see race" and not understand how that position itself upholds white supremacy.
They might suggest racism can be solved by not talking about race and get no pushback from a community whose members by-and-large have no experience of being subject to racial discrimination themselves.

Generally, there are things we all don't know we don't know and the more similar those around us are to us, the more overlap there is likely to be in those things.

A diverse community is less likely to be oblivious to its own lack of knowledge.

I'm white, and I just took that to mean they'd like to see more diversity. As in, it's not unfortunate that members are white so much as unfortunate they haven't attracted more diverse representation (if I'm right, I do think it could have been worded better).

And to be clear, in contexts like this, no one is dividing people "by color," but by experience. While race may be largely imaginary biologically, it has been and continues to be a major variable related to a person's economics, education, housing, etc. due to the external factors that do treat race as significant (i.e., as an American, we have historically and systemically discriminated against non-white people in pretty much every facet of civic and social life).

That stuff matters to...a lot of people. But it's not at the expense of white people--we can all be happy to see diversity in our communities. It's a net gain for everyone.

I don't understand why race is important in a medium where we can't see each others.

Because people bring their personal experiences, histories, and identities to every discussion. Having a folks with a range of different experiences and identities contributing, imo, greatly benefits discussions; I want to hear multiple perspectives on an issue (within reason of course - I'm not interested in engaging with racists, transphobes, fascists, etc., for obvious reasons). If a community is very one-sided (ex. Mostly white folks, mostly men, and so on) how can I curate a well-balanced perspective on a given topic? I only know what I know, and if everybody around me is coming from a similar background and we're all saying the same shit - what kind of discussion is that?

That's a lot of words for you to say you literally have zero understanding how the lived experience of people of color is very different.

Beehaw wants to be better than reddit, which was mostly straight white men voices at the detriment of everyone else. It's really dishonest as even in the EU the loved experience of people of color is different.

It's really ignorant and narrow-minded of you as white people are a minority worldwide but the majority in wealth and tech. A space that celebrates people of color is rare and why oh fucking why do you HAVE to make it about you?

What is ‘white’ [...] Where I am from, we don’t make these distinctions on the color of a person. That and the fact that unless we are quantifying somehow the ‘shade’ of the skin color it’s impossible to make any serious category.

i absolutely promise that your country does, whether you are conscious of that or not. whiteness, in any case, is a social construct (and even if it wasn't, race and ethnicity are also basically arbitrary) so you're not going to ever get a singular, satisfactory answer on this. the whole point at a sociological level is that it's an amorphous, hegemony-based category that transcends political barriers and basically divides the world into "haves" and "have-nots". it doesn't make sense because it can't ever, it's arbitrary, and it's not a "serious" category because it's not really intended to be.

unfortunately, on that basis it's also the single most important (and unambiguous) descriptor of one's racial identity in a global context--so we're kind of locked into using it here because it is actually really important to know what our community looks like, and we don't literally want to use American census groupings.

Where I am from, we don’t make these distinctions on the color of a person.

Not everybody is from wherever you're from. There's a chart up there for that, too.

I don’t understand why race is important in a medium where we can’t see each others.

I think it matters if the demographics of the site skew strongly from the demographics of the countries represented, as that suggests something about the site might be offputting to certain people.

Though I don't think this is the case based on the results?

Yeah, this whole thing REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. I'm going to get shit for this, but it comes off as really sexist, racist and - as someone who is neurodivergent - kinda condescending.

Yeah, Reddit and a lot of forum websites are very heavily biased towards men so I'm not surprised we ended up inheriting that bias. I'd be nice to reach out to correct that bias.

One other thing to note is that this doesn't give us any information on trans people which might affect how we assess that bias. It's something that would be interesting to see in a future survey.