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This article is trash, and a lie that white parents in the suburbs tell themselves. Trump didn't make Hudson Valley kids racist/sexist. Your kids were already that way, but you don't listen to Black kids, so you don't know that.
NY State is Blacker than the US overall, but Hudson Valley is much whiter than the US overall. Ask a Black New Yorker why that is.
And stop pretending that manly men are conservative. Again: Black men are more masculine + more progressive.
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@mekkaokereke Abandoning kids to the algorithms pushing extremism and to shtbags like Andrew Tate & his ilk have done enormous damage.
Black kids are online *a lot* more than white kids.
And yet, most Black boys think Tate is a loser, and that his fans are even bigger losers. Before the news became common knowledge, I explained what most Black men think of Tate. (CW: Discussion of Tate. It's bad. You really don't have to read this.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109621372212531350 )
The NY Times' trash crime coverage, and copaganda shows like "Law and Order" have done much more to encourage racism in these kids than social media has.
@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland The algorithm shows different kids different stuff.
IMO, the tell in the original story is the dieting. That's always been a really niche idea, but selling diet pills to healthy people is literally the business of right-wing radio.
You don't think Black kids and girls of all races get shown Tate videos too? They do. The difference is who responds to it, likes it, searches for more, favorites, shares, comments positively on, Tate videos. I'll tell you who: losers that hate women and girls.
Recommendation systems don't magically know what you like before you've interacted.
The whole fitness industry sells stuff! But again, not everyone sporty goes fash. It's not fitness, or sports, or masculinity.
@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I think you're being too reductive. These kids don't start out fascist.
I'm not trying to give them excuses. They are making conscious choices based on the media that's presented to them.
If we get out of this, we're going to have to seriously grapple with the challenge to society of giving anyone with an internet connection unfettered access to our brains.
@tob If the kids were brought up to be anti-racist they'd think racism is stupid. If they'd been brought up to treat girls as equals they'd treat girls as equals and think sexism is stupid. These are values that are learned at home. @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
@fifilamoura @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I don’t think it’s that simple. I have a 9 year old that I’ve spent 9 years trying to do the right thing but he still gets Tate Jr content pushed to him and his friends online. We’ve had to have a lot of conversations about what he repeats because he doesn’t even realize that it’s racist and sexist dog whistles. It’s a full time job. Social media absolutely targets kids and subtly pushes this bullshit on them
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io@tas50 @fifilamoura @tob @wendinoakland
Were talking about two different things.
1) Does your kid ever see this stuff?
2) Does your kid internalize this stuff and repeat the hate out into the world?
How often does your 9 year old interact with positive Black men role models? Weekly? Monthly? Are there 5 or 6 Black men that are part of your close community? I'm guessing no.
Because that's probably the easiest way to innoculate your kid from thinking that Tate is cool.
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@tas50 @fifilamoura @tob @wendinoakland
Wait, I don't need to do a mini thread on this. Fifi already said it!
Innoculation is a great metaphor here. One useful way of looking at facism, misogyny, nativism, transphobia etc are as diseases that we're all susceptible to, to a greater or lesser extent. Of course it's not an exact model -- in particular unlike impersonal diseases that happen to us, bigotry is a choice, so I'm not absolving anybody from personal responsibility. But it's still useful.
From a public health perspective, the people in power collectively benefit from the pervasiveness of these diseases. So they refuse to do the obvious things to reduce the conditions for these diseases to spread. Instead, they actively try to spread them.
In aid of this they've gotten extremely good at targeting propaganda to leverage and magnify existing bigotry. It's not just social media, it's also Fox News, talk radio and podcasts, Sinclair media, the so-called "liberal" media, etc etc etc -- and their interactions, using social media to promote propagnda from other media.
Like all public health issues, we really need collective solutions ... but that's not on the table, in the short term. What we can do, individualy and as part of families and organizations, is to try to inocculate ourselves and others against this to some extent.
I agree with Mekka that Black parents are generally a lot more effective at inocculating their kids against the white manosphere -- and other forms of racism -- than white parents. White people collectively need to get better at innoculating white people against racism: themselves, their families and friend groups, their colleagues, and to the extent they have influence their orgnaizations.
Including here on the fediverse, by the way!
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke great resource Jon! Thanks for putting together!
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke And Mekka, your threads are always full of great insights! Big thanks!
@dgodon@mastodon.online glad it's useful ... and my pleasure! Ally work FTW :)
@jdp23 I had to lookup what “anti-black” actually meant because, as a white guy who is striving to be non-racist, I honestly still had no idea what it meant specifically…
“Anti-black racism is the specific exclusion and prejudice against people visibly (or perceived to be) of African descent – what most of us would commonly call black people,’ says senior policy officer Kim McIntosh.
Kim says anti-blackness goes beyond bad feelings, negative attitudes or stereotypes.
‘Anti-black racism is a toxic cocktail that mixes these beliefs with how people with power make decisions, how government policies are made, or how state services are delivered,’ she adds. ‘It prevents us from enjoying or exercising fundamental freedoms on an equal footing – like the freedom to live and work free from discrimination or abuse.’”
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/20/what-is-anti-blackness-12279678/
@GuyDudeman@beige.party that's a really good article, thanks! wow i can't believe that it's in Metro of all places. I'll add a link to it article in the first footnote.
I too am a white guy striving to be anti-racist (not just non-racist) ... I went with the definition
Anti-Blackness – beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people across the world
because it's got academic cred. I double-checked it with a couple of Black experts and they thought it was solid.
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke Treating knife crime as a quasi-epidemic was remarkably effective in Scotland. It's really exciting to consider that other social ills could be treated the same way!
Yeah. Another good metaphor for the information aspects is toxicity and pollution - https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21020284/whitney-phillips-fake-news-misinformation-disinformation-you-are-here-book-interview is a good intro to Whitney Phillips' work on that front.
Unfortunately, "could be treated" is a lot different from "are being treated", but fedi is as well placed as anybody to change that. Which doesn't mean it'll happen but still.
@jackeric@beige.party @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
Thinking about this more ... this need for inocculation generalizes to other dimensions. Guys need to get better at inocculating themselves and others against sexism. Cis people need to get better at inocculating themselves and others (INCLUDING CENTRIST DEMOCRATS, oh sorry didn't mean to shout, it's just at top of mind) against anti-trans bigotry. People born in the US need to get better at inocculating themselves and others against nativism. People who aren't Muslims, people who aren't Jews, people who arent't disabled ... etc etc etc.
And back to my point in the previous thread about how fascists have gotten really good at precise targeting: trans people are in general resistant to the white manosphere, so that's not an effective vector for spreading racism to trans people. But racist non-Black trans people are a vector that's very well tuned for spreading racism with trans people!
Similarly the Black, Latino, and Asian manospheres are vectors tuned for spreading misogyny and anti-trans bigotry (and also specific forms of racism) to the audiences that will be most receptive. And there are nativist organizations and networks that are similarly tuned for spreading anti-immigrant bigotry in those communities.
So we really need intersectional inocculation. It's really really really frustrating that the white supremacists understand how to exploit intersectional dynamics to drive wedges and magnify bigotry so much better than white progressives understand how to leverage intersectional dynamics to resist being exploited ... and yet here we are.
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe @tob@hachyderm.io @wendinoakland@beige.party
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke @fifilamoura @tob That’s a lot of reductive assumption for one post.
what do you see as reductive? @wendinoakland@beige.party @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe @tob@hachyderm.io
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke @fifilamoura @tob You’re making very big assumptions about large groups. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful.
@wendinoakland What do you think would be constructive and helpful? How would you approach this? @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob
@fifilamoura @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob There are generalizations made about minority communities without any examination. Even the vileness of whyte peoples’racism is too broad to boil down succinctly. And yes, sure inoculation would be fantastic, but we are vulnerable as youngsters to the predispositions of our parents and elders. We, each of us, has work to do, reckoning, reading, retraining ourselves.
@wendinoakland I'm not sure what you're actually proposing here. "we all have to retrain ourselves" isn't really proposing any real concrete action, particularly in regards to people who don't think they're bigots (which is most people, including ones who act like bigots). It's also individualizing the problem and that's how we got here. We actually need each other to deconstruct our bigotries because we usually can't see them in ourselves or our words or actions. @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob
@fifilamoura @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob Sorry, I should probably back out now. I’m not sure what we can do but educate each other, try to understand that we need to change the way we see our fellow humans — that we need to SEE all our fellow humans as we see ourselves. But I don’t have an answer.
@wendinoakland I appreciate the honesty and everyone's at their own stage of deconstructing harmful beliefs and trying to figure out a way forward. A lot of us are also feeling pretty raw right now. Take care. @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob