To Othello: You are super cool and I really appreciate reading what you have to say. I really appreciate your perspective and all you give to this community. I hope the rest of us can make this a good enough place for you to stay. You deserve a good place where your comrades have your back. [/gen, angry on your behalf, hoping you stay]

To the white fragile people who were being assholes to Othello,: Raise your fucking standards for yourself. Read. Learn. Don’t take out your fragility and big feelings about race on black people. Do you feel upset when a black person expresses feelings about race? Do some reading about the history of racism. Do some emotional work. Don’t turn your ignorance and your feelings into a burden for black people. Don’t take out your insecurities, your anger, your fragility, your fear on black people. Deal with it yourself. If you don’t have the tools, find them. Research. Learn. And if you don’t have the energy for that, then shut the fuck up.

To my fellow white people on this site: We have to do better about defending our black, indigenous, and people of color comrades on this site. Yes, it takes work to learn, it takes time and energy and discomfort and going outside of our comfort zones. But we have to do that work, and we have to do a better job. We have to collectively create a site where our black, indigenous, and people of color comrades feel safe, where they know we’ll be there for them and have their backs. It’s fun to shitpost, and shitposting is an important part of the culture here too. But we also have to do ongoing work to make it so that when we see racism, we notice it, and call it out. It might take the mods a while to get to delete and ban racism, but we should be there to back our comrades up and make racists feel unwelcome. An important part of leftism is making sure that we have spaces that feel good for our comrades to be in. We need to be able to create and maintain spaces that are supportive. With the federations having happened, there’s been somewhat of a focus on bringing leftism to other communities, educating outsiders etc, but we also have to remember that gaining numbers by bringing in outsiders is not the only factor affecting numbers. If we bring in assholes, and then they drive out people from minority groups, then we haven’t actually gained anything good. We need to create spaces where our black, indigenous, and people of color comrades can stay. And from my digging to try to figure out what this was all about, it sounds like some (or all? not sure) of the users harassing Othello were from inside hexbear. So we need to do better. We need to go out of our way to do the emotional work, educate ourselves, and actively look for racism on the site so we can stamp it out.