Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

> So I think it behooves privileged geeks like myself to help find and improve an alternate home for things like #BlackTwitter.

I always suspected these attitudes were common amongst the white leftwing intelligentsia, but here it is in black and white (no pun intended).

Here’s the author admitting his White Saviour complex.

What causes this behaviour? Is it a form of co-dependency? Or do these white folk feel that publicly and overtly shepherding minority groups will boost their own popularity or influence? Or is it simply virtue-signalling without self-awareness?

I just don’t get it.

View on HN

>What causes this behaviour?

As someone who's brown it's always been really irritating to have the white people try to pretend (and some of them even believe it) to have the white knight/savior complex.

Just leave me alone and let me do my own shit ffs. Browns and Blacks are not not mentally challenged 12 year olds.

I'd say that minority (or even not-so minority in the case of women's) rights need to be defended by the majority/dominant group in order to be socially defendable. 78% supported same sex marriage in Ireland when it was legalised in 2015, and that wasn't because 78% were gay.

There’s a difference between supporting marriage equality and, say, a straight man standing on a pedestal and announcing he wants to unilaterally “re-home the gay community” despite not a single gay person asking for this.

He notes many are asking for it. They want to migrate off Twitter but require Quote Tweet.

Yes because apparently it's part of the black culture, the author says. I do not know what kind of ivory tower echo chamber this person is interacting with, to reduce an entire ethnicity to a specific feature they really need to feel heard.

Ain't that some inane Twitterati bullshit. The author is trying so hard to be inclusive to black minorities, it's starting to feel racist.

He's saying that there is a group of people who are stuck on a platform they don't like because of a feature missing from Mastodon that the users who can't switch called out themselves. The only racists here are the people who think he shouldn't help just because he's a different race.

> Mastodon is missing some necessary affordances; in particular the Quote Tweet, said to be crucial to #BlackTwitter culture

Emphasis mine. I don't think he wants to help fight racial equality. He just want to fight for a subset of black Twitter nerds, and from his ivory tower he equates them with an entire ethnicity. Then wonders if Mastodon, lacking Quote Tweets is unethical because how can black people communicate then?!

Spoiler alert, the black racial struggle is bigger than Afro-American nerds identifying with an hashtag on Twitter, with a deep love for quoting tweets.

> Then wonders if Mastodon, lacking Quote Tweets is unethical because how can black people communicate then

He wonders if migrating to Mastodon without crossposting might be unethical because it cuts people who are stuck on Twitter off from the group who has migrated. You have deliberately misinterpreted what he said. Consider why you might have done so and why you think he wants to "fight racial equality [sic]." You've been hoodwinked into fighting a culture war that only one side is fighting. The same duped culture warriors who have been fighting against teaching about American history from the perspective of native Americans and slaves and have been fighting against some "war on Christmas" for the last two decades.

You don’t get how some people might care about communities other than their own?

I’m talking about the degree of elitism / superiority / technocratic urge that makes a white man feel he’s responsible for “finding a home” for black people - as if they’re not capable of making that choice themselves. This attitude is known as the soft bigotry of low expectations.

I see no evidence that he asked any black person, let alone the whole black community, if they wanted Tim Bray to select a new home for them.

He read some blogs and is following black-skinned people, so he knows all about black culture and has elected to be a champion of their ideals.

This is the "I am not racist, I have black friends" for people that spend way too much time on Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com