User:François Robere/sandbox/Dealing with racism on Wikipedia

Dealing with racism on Wikipedia
Having edited in the topic area of World War II and Holocaust history for the past year and a half, I've come across all sorts of biases and fallacies: Żydokomuna being raised again and again; claims of Jewish economic power, of collaboration with Soviets and Nazis, and of "banditry" - "bandits" being an old phrase used to refer to Jewish partisans - raised, justified and debated - fought over - as if they were established history, rather than well-studied stereotype. And yet, despite repeated appeals over several months, the admins at the boards remained mostly silent: "content, not conduct" they said, as if the promotion of antisemitic tropes is any less their care than BLPs, HOAXes and VANDALs. For a while I wondered why they had acted this way, until it finally dawned on me: they have no idea what antisemitism really is.

Expressions of racism and prejudice are not always as obvious as wearing a pointy hat and attending a Klan meeting; racism is often expressed in much subtler and context-sensitive ways: it's dogwhistling, microagressions and structural discrimination; it's people crossing to the other side of the road when they see a black man walking towards them; it's security checkers asking a "brown" person to step aside because they look different; it's claiming welfare is there for "lazy people"; it's rating female teachers lower than male ones, regardless of the quality of their teaching; it's being talked over as if you're not there. It's assuming you must be "Patel" because you're Indian, or that you're really smart because you're Asian;; it's assuming you're staff because you're brown, or refused entry because you're black. It's picking a white person out of a pool of identical CVs, just because they're white. Racism isn't only about Jim Crow laws and institutional discrimination, it's also about ordinary people going about their daily lives without being aware of how their own perceptions and behaviors are influenced by internalized biases. Put differently: it's not about whether one "is" or "isn't" prejudiced, it's about how much.

Unless of course you're a Wikipedia admin, in which case if there's no "filthy Jew!" in the mix then there's no reason to get excited. WP:BLOCKNAZIS, the guiding essay for some of the admins, is a simplistic - not to say infantile - piece of prose, that captures none of the intricacies and subtleties of bias and prejudice in a liberal society. It is not something that can be relied upon in a massive multi-cultural project like Wikipedia, and the fact that it's espoused by some of the admins as some sort of reference is a testament to ignorance more than anything else.

But then, how would they know better? The average Wikipedia administrator is a male under 45 from a predominantly white, Christian country, who in all likelihood has no experience whatsoever of being prejudiced against; his chances of intuitively understanding the experience of those who have is close to nil, and he might even resist the question altogether. And so when applying policy on the matter, he will tend to believe in his own enlightenment, while in fact doing very little to progress equality and equity.

And so we end up with a primarily Euro- and andro-centric encyclopedia, which despite its liberal leanings (stemming from its innate pluralism) is still a place where minorities have to fight for equal representation, just as they do anywhere else. A system that is illiterate of minorities cannot achieve equity; if the WMF and the community are serious about fostering an inclusive, diverse and capable editorship, then they must educate their admins to hold themselves, and the community, to higher standards.