TL;DR
I want to create a subreddit that's dedicated not only to selfies and commiseration about trauma, but also toward building community, clear thinking about issues, artistic collaboration and taking action in the real world.
What do you think?
Not "just" a biracial space, though.
(Read more about Shyamala Gopalan here.)
Until today, I somewhat frequently posted in a popular black subreddit. From the beginning, several things about that place bothered me, but I kept ignoring them until now. More about that further down.
For months, my posts on that subreddit were generally oriented toward encouraging creativity and community action.
What about encouraging entrepreneurship, help people find each other to go protesting, facilitate friendships and (post-pandemic) meetups? The response was always either silence, tepid agreement, or "that's not what we do here". Why not, though? Why not also encourage critical/creative thinking and real-world engagement, making it easier to connect resources and people?
The subreddit was dedicated almost exclusively to selfies, reactions to tweets, commiserating about trauma and a daily set of daily COVID-19 obituaries. And increasingly, a troubling amount of tolerance for a strain of Youtube-and-Twitter self-help cult misandry called "the Divest movement".
The last straw was when someone posted a topic that was openly about manipulating men in exchange for sex. It was one of a long line of misandrist "divest" topics protected by the moderators as "free speech", even though the majority of the community clearly did not approve.
The moderators of that subreddit have a history of not really caring about everyone equally: it was only after transgender people became a social media trend that the mods suddenly realised transphobia is wrong.
They still haven't realised that misandry (hatred of the masculine gender) is just as bad.
In this case, one of the moderators actually commented in support of using men (sex) for money ("gifts"), and soon after that, I was (thankfully) banned because I refused to "verify" my ethnicity/gender. The demand was: A. arbitrary, really because I dared to disagree with a bigoted perspective; B. a privacy violation; C. irrelevant to the issue at hand; and D. silly given that white people of all genders pop up in the comments there all the time.
So I want to create a subreddit that goes further. T
... keep reading on reddit ➡
