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One big takeaway from Ibram X. Kendi "How to Be an Antiracist" is the idea of segregationist vs assimilationist racism. Both are problematic. I'd say the latter has its heart in a slightly better place. It's sometimes the result of acknowledging the hierarchical judging people generally use to evaluate differences in groups, and so tries to blur everything into a big melting pot any race can participate in.

The book mentions the importance of black (and other group) spaces, enclaves where a given minority is empowered to make the decisions about it - and where a member of that group can be part of a local majority, the default, instead of always being "othered".

In December's Wired (catching up on a backlog) Jason Parham echoes that idea and talks about some important places on the early web that were that.

It's an idea I can get behind but man do I dread the dumbass "but doesn't that make THEM the racists, not letting fine white folk like me in because of the color of my skin?" arguments I'd likely have to get into rebutting. (And I do wonder, how gatekeeping for that kind of thing could/should work - but of course the whole point is that's not for people like me to decide.)

Parham talks about the Blackness of the current web:

Functionally, the web is still very black. Our identities are embedded in Black Twitter-fueled memes and reaction GIFs, from Kermit sipping tea to Real Housewives star NeNe Leakes' virtuoso shade-serving. Black culture is likewise a major artery of platforms like TikTok and our beloved Vine (RIP). Even the very modes of exposure find root in blackness: Black death and its digital-era companion, the police brutality video, became a terrifyingly mundane 21st-century spectacle, recorded, uploaded, and shared with perverse frequency. "Blackness gave virality its teeth. Turned it into trauma," the writer and academic Lauren Michele Jackson has said. In life and in death, black people are the bones and lungs of the web, its very body.

Of course it's interesting- and disturbing- to think of some the toxic whiteness at other parts of the web are fostering, the whole 4chan/QAnon/alt-right shit, which is so very talented at coopting shit.