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A young friend of mine is a member of a club, one whose title implies doing what is Good™ and Right™ but is mostly a place to meet cool people and it looks good on your resume. Someone at the club has apparently been using racial slurs, and no one has addressed this publicly.
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So my friend, who is young and also a nerd (my favorite ppl), sent an email to the entire club saying that ignoring things like this bad and what about the title mission etc. A lot of people responded saying "yes, and in addition..." She told me about all this with great pride.
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So I asked if those slurs are worth canceling the perpetrator over, and my friend got really upset and said that she said explicitly in her email that it's not about canceling anyone and why am I so mean and wouldn't I do the same. So I explained how these dynamics work.
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Every person now feels pressure to reply with an email escalating the response, to get credit and avoid blame. And no matter how crazy the mood gets nobody can defend the perp or suggest de-escalating the response because that immediately puts them publicly on the side of racism.
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So best case scenario, the racist gets cancelled even though nobody really wanted to cancel them and this is not a very woke club anyway, just because once racial slurs are public knowledge everyone has to shoot or be shot at and my friend's email made it public knowledge.
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The worst case scenario is that the perp can't be kicked out. Without a scapegoat there's only collective punishment. So, months of racial sensitivity training, lest the club be known as a place that "doesn't address racism seriously". And everyone knows my friend is at fault.
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This isn't the most cynical analysis of the situation. For example, it doesn't account for the possible existence of sociopaths who will use this opportunity to advance themselves and settle scores with rivals. "You know who else I heard saying this thing..."
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This isn't particular to this case, it's a general dynamic that happens everywhere. If some organization is behaving in a way that seems incongruent with its stated principles, there's often an important and load bearing reason for this and you should tread really carefully.
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Anyway, my friend couldn't grok or simply didn't believe anything I was saying. I felt this huge gulf between us, that the first thing my mind went to is a place her mind couldn't go. We really all live in different worlds, even people you think you know.
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