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   Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 01:34:57 JST Tattie

   in reply to

   Fedi is fucking rotten for this. We're full of people with passionate anti-racist intent, who have never deconstructed this perpetrator-centred view of racism.

   So yeah, let's talk about that incident, and our response to it. A white person with Tourette's says the N-word to two black people, in the presence of many more. A black person here on Fedi highlights the damage that does.

   Immediately, what happens? We're focused on whether the perpetrator "could help it" or not, or whether they're "secretly a racist". It all becomes about him, his motivation, his moral purity. Loads of really fucking ableist shit is said, there's pushback, and suddenly we're trundling towards a broken narrative of "black people versus disabled people", harming both groups, and the intersection in particular.

   Meanwhile black voices are not being listened to. The conversation that we should be having, centering what it is like as a black person to have the N-word shouted at you, the harm it does, how we can repair that damage and prevent a reoccurrence... none of that is being talked about.

   And people are not taking the hint that they, too, could cause racist harm. They know they don't have racist intent, and they proudly affirm their commitment to the anti-racist cause as they, uh, go after a person with Tourette's?

   Ugh.

   • Embed this notice
     Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 01:34:58 JST Tattie

     [Alan] Freeman blamed the tendency of judges to focus on the perspective of the perpetrator of racial discrimination—what did he intend, what did he do—rather than on the perspective of the victim—in what ways do legal arrangements impede his freedom. For Freeman, the result was to normalize the “conditions” of racial inequality and reinforce the notion that most Americans were innocent of participating in racial injustice—the problem lay with a small group of prejudiced individuals acting with discriminatory intent.
     -- Crenshaw et al, 1995

     Oh, we think it's not racism if it's not done "with intent"? And so we concern ourselves almost entirely with examining the character of the person perpetrating the racism, rather than centering the people who were harmed by it and asking ourselves what reparation they are due?

     Now what recent event does that bring to mind? 🤔

     Rich Felker repeated this.