Notices by Sam (samuteki@ohay.ooo), page 3

If White people can't figure out how to make money off of some aspect of your culture, they will spend all their energy trying to convince you that it's worthless.

#introduction post

Hi, I'm Sam! I just opened up ohay.ooo, a cozy little space for English-speakers in Japan, which I hope will be a safe space for minorities and marginalized people to share their voices.

I'm slowly building up my freelance logo design and web design business. (Check out samthedesigner.com)

I post a lot about my experience in Japan, anti-racism, and occasionally topical things like news and entertainment.

#Introduction
#BlackMastodon #GTwitter #AntiRacist
#LogoDesign #WebDesign #GrapgicDesign #Freelancer
#Movies #TV #Comics #Manga

Anger is a gift.
When you are mistreated, it comes to remind you of your worth.
When you are knocked down, it comes to tell you to stand back up.
It's an abused psyche trying to heal itself.

But anger can be dangerous, too. It gives you a feeling of power. But if that power is unchecked, it can quickly become destructive. Instead of learning to stand up for yourself, you learn to knock other people down.

If you're an immigrant in Japan and looking for a safe place to Toot, come on over to https://ohay.ooo

The implications of being labeled a racist are so frightening that they resist any attempts to address even the possibility of any problems with their behavior.

This is how you end up with the phenomenon of people joining progressive/leftist/democratic spaces who use all the right terminology and repeat all the same supportive phrases in public, but still end up acting on discriminatory and biased thoughts and speech in private.

Racism is capital-'c' Complicated.

Institutional racism. Interpersonal racism. Internalized racism. Structural racism.

I have argued for a while now that we *all* have issues with racism, because racism is a system that's been in place for hundreds of years, working on the subconscious minds of everyone around us.

You need to do some work.
I need to do some work. Investigate the thoughts that you have. You don't have to demonize yourself, but you do have to be honest with yourself if you want to be part of a society where racism is a thing of the past.

'Racist' is a word that is so demonized it almost doesn't have any meaning anymore.

As such, people that have problems with the way they interact with minorities or people from different ethnic groups sometimes retreat into a deep, deep denial about these problems.

racist = bad person
I = good person
Therefore,
I =/= racist

I joined Mastodon in May 2022 with an eye towards making this a place my Twitter community might be able to use as a refuge from the worrying and increasing abuse and belittling we received there.

However, it wasn't quite time for me to create a community yet, and so instead I decided to join a moderation team or two in order to learn the ropes. What were the unique problems that came with running an instance, what were the daily challenges of dealing with users from different servers, what was the culture of Masto/Fedi, what tools and techniques were being used to keep people safe.

(cont.)

Being an instance admin/mod is a position of responsibility and accountability. You owe (yes, owe) the people on your instance the assurance that your actions as a leader will be level-headed, fair, and free of personal grievances in your dealings with other instances—because your behavior with users outside of your instance gives great insight into your potential behavior inside of your instance as well.

I am begging everyone using the /#fediblock hashtag to keep it clear of personal vendettas and diatribes. It's your choice how to manage your community, but misusing fediblock, a tool for keeping Masto users and communities safe, for lashing out and revenge, flies in the face of a worthy goal and a powerful tool for good.

#FediBlockMeta

@Shivviness #AltText : Excerpt from King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."

(6/6) Yes, human society has (for the most part) evolved past barbarism. But we fool ourselves to think that this farcical peace is the best way that things can be. We have evolved to love peace for some, and justice for even fewer.

I say fuck being nice. I say fuck being agreeable. I say fuck being quiet.

Not when there's a noose around my people's necks.

Yes—being complacent will make people like you more. Yes, it's safer. But it's getting angry that brings change. It's getting angry that gets people joining forces. It's anger that pushes the mountainous status quo forward.

(5/6) But society at large does not care about the nuances contained in the struggles of groups it is not directly connected to. Society is peace-loving at the expense of being justice-loving, and is content to let all the wickedness in the hearts of powerful people play with the powerless like toys as long as neither of them makes too much noise.

Society at large sees no difference between the anger of the abused and the anger of the abuser. The end result of anger is the same, that being the disruption of peace. That is the only problem.

As long as the abused receives the abuse humbly and politely, there is no problem. As long as the abuser metes out the abuse with a necktie and a smile, there is no problem.

But if the abused does complain? They are a problem. If they get angry? They're a trouble maker. If they speak up for themselves? They're 'difficult'. If they demand change? They're ingrates.

(4/6) And that means you can't get /angry/ at someone like DeSantis. Because angry people are not nice. Nice is good. Angry is bad. Angry people disturb the peace. Nice people maintain the peace.

Maintain the peace even as unarmed Black bodies fall to racist violence, year after year after year. Maintain the peace as transgender people fear that if they step outside of their homes as their authentic selves in the morning that they might not come back home that night. Maintain peace as immigrants along our borders are cut and killed by razor discs hiding in the water.

Anger is terribly misunderstood. The anger of the oppressor is the anger of power-lust and domination. It is an anger of destruction.

The anger of the oppressed serves a very important purpose—change. It is the anger of life. Of self-preservation.

(3/6) Something about Ron DeSantis' comments on the August 27th shooting in Florida placed a splinter in my mind. DeSantis is the current governor of the state of Florida, and has recently been criticized throughout the country, even by other Republican party members, for endorsing reforms to Florida's education system. Some of these reforms include a mandate that teachers instruct students that slavery was beneficial to enslaved African Americans.

A racist Republican who hates Black people. Okay.

But then, just a few days ago, in Florida, a racist with a gun covered in drawings of swastikas murdered three Black people in cold blood. And Ron DeSantis called him a scumbag.

DeSantis is both a great and terrible example of what I'm talking about. Terrible, because nobody actually believes he gives a damn about Black people. Great, because even someone as callously anti-Black as DeSantis is using niceness (and this tragedy) as a shield for his barbarism at the policy level.

(2/6)In the old days, might made right. If you were an oppressed person, you still had to be 'nice' to your social betters, but they were under no such obligation. They could mostly harass and assault you in any way they pleased without fear of repercussions.

But, as hard as it can be to believe sometimes, society has evolved. Society demands that we appear to be civilized—that we be nice, polite, friendly, etc. We have come to like a certain amount of stability in our societies, and we have learned that open displays of aggression lead to an awful lot of fighting and revenge and war, things which disrupt the peace of social stability.

So society demands that even powerful people, even oppressors, maintain the appearance of being nice. (In the case of police and military, to at least not look like blood-thirsty maniacs.) No more Old Testament badassery—that'll get you shunned from your community; we're supposed to be New Testament, love and peace, above wanton violence and barbarism.

I learned this year that "being nice" is one of the oppressor's most important tools in modern society.

Part of the reason I started this instance was so that I, and anyone who chooses to join me, could talk freely about things that are not supposed to be talked about in Japan, on Twitter or otherwise.

Racism is a problem in Japan. It's a problem in the US. It's a problem in Europe. It's a problem everywhere.

A very unique set of circumstances occurs where people *from other countries* come to Japan and maintain racist beliefs. The same kinds of people who insist that racism doesn't exist (or if it does, that people like *me* are the ones who perpetuate it) take their beliefs from home, go abroad, sometimes to countries that do not have significant discussions or understandings concerning racism, and probably feel even freer to spout their hate than they did back home.

Here, no one will challenge them. Especially in a country like Japan, where "politics" aren't often discussed in public.