Continuing the discussion from Why I'm leaving discuss.python.org:

@pf_moore Apologies, I overlooked something in replying to you in Steve’s thread. I’m pinging you over here because it accidentally perfectly illustrated a key point I need to make about the bias inherent in the CoC in practice, despite its overtures towards being “inclusive” and even-handed.

This is not one of the posts I originally planned, but so it goes.

Karl Knechtel (@kknechtel), in post 65 of thread 58093:

For the record, I tried actually searching. “Good” appears once, and “faith” not at all.

It’s not in the CoC itself, but in the enforcement policies:

A person who makes a report should receive a follow-up email stating what action was taken in response to the report. If the work group decided no response was needed, they should provide an email explaining why it was not a Code of Conduct violation. Reports that are not made in good faith (such as “reverse sexism” or “reverse racism”) may receive no response.

There are three things I need to draw attention to here.

First: even reading the CoC itself doesn’t tell you what the CoC apparently actually means, to those entrusted to enforce it. Openness is indeed severely lacking.

Second: this is the language of uncharitable ideologues who have written off their interlocutors and do not understand the argument being made, because they have not engaged with it. The terms “reverse sexism” and “reverse racism” are used exclusively by those who wish to write off those claims - not by anyone who actually makes them (at least, not anyone who has any experience making them, or who has put significant thought into them, or had like-minded mentors). That’s because they’re nonsense by construction.

What these terms mean, used by those who use them, is sexism (against men) and racism (against white people, typically; perhaps against the locally majority race, in a global context; hereafter I’ll just say “white people” for simplicity). People who complain sincerely about sexism against men call it “sexism”, because it is. People who complain sincerely about racism against white people call it “racism”, because it is.

Sexism and racism - and, indeed, all forms of bigotry - cannot, fundamentally, be “reversed”. It is as nonsensical as saying “reverse mass”. But discrimination against men on the basis of sex is sexism, and discrimination against white people on the basis of race is racism.

Those who disagree are abusing language to play power games. And in doing so, they empower others to cause harm to real, living people.

Third, but almost a corollary: the CoC WG writes off a priori, as a matter of policy, the possibility that a report of someone discriminating against a man or a white person, on that basis, could be legitimate. Such discrimination absolutely does exist. I’ve been personally subjected to it more times than I can count. There are entire libraries of evidence to support these positions.1 But no matter. Turns out that the protection against “insults, put downs, or jokes that are based upon stereotypes, that are exclusionary, or that hold others up for ridicule” is not actually meant for me, but only for others.

I should watch my tongue, theoretically. After all - if my research is correct (and it took quite a bit of digging around old threads here and even into the old mailing lists), someone once got banned for making very similar points, and in particular for pointing out that accusations of “white supremacy” are in fact quite serious, and that the concept is more broadly used to stereotype white people as immoral, self-centered and/or bigoted. And that people will do this in one breath, and deny that they are doing any such thing in the next, and question your “white defensiveness” (or perhaps “white fragility”) in the one after that, for daring to object.2

But, you know, I’m leaving anyway. And I have said nothing that could rationally be considered offensive. And the people who take offense from ideas like those I present are, in my view, by so doing, causing real harm.

  1. For the sexism bit, here’s a website by a former Internet acquaintance. Also, fun fact: did you know that 70% of “missing and murdered” Indigenous people in Canada are men? Yet, “missing and murdered Indigenous women” (sometimes “… and girls”) is a set phrase in Canadian political discourse (and elsewhere, apparently). ↩

  2. If any of that sounds familiar: there was at least one such instance in the conversation that I’m talking about. ↩