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I have to admit that the one tiny silver lining of our horrific current moment is that you just don’t see people shanking each other over stuff like “is it cultural appropriation for a white woman to sell coconut water” anymore

(I also couldn’t help but notice at the time that white *men* running restaurants and selling products from cultures they didn’t originate from usually got way more of a free pass than white women doing the same thing, but well, so it goes).

The other one i still think about frequently are the posters (inevitably white themselves) who were convinced white people saying “y’all”, because they are Southern, are Deeply Problematic

These people do still exist to a certain extent but they seem way more quiet and universally made fun of than they used to be

And yes, we of course should still call out white people who are being shitheads who refuse to acknowledge who they got their ideas from or who inspired them, but I still think deeming randos history’s greatest monsters over stuff like coconut water was not, perhaps, the best use of our energy

at least in my social world, I’m not seeing a retreat from social justice, but I am seeing a pretty encouraging degree of “perhaps we should focus less on being right on the internet as a way to fight bigots, and more on actually doing stuff”

I do think part of it is that a lot of people just aged out of that kind of thing and got more perspective. So online fights about who is allowed to eat what food just puttered out because we’re not in our teens/early 20’s anymore.

Emotionally immature people too I guess lol. I’m coming at it from a “I lived on tumblr from 2011 to 2016” perspective I guess.

Eh. FFXIV Twitter in the early 2020’s definitely had a tint of people who should be old enough to know better act like playing a video game in a certain way was activism. Maybe the internet is just one giant high school.