I am not, I actually volunteer 5h a week to teach kids in underprivileged neighborhoods, in an attempt to reduce the racial gap in the United States. There are a lot of racial problems in the US, due to the botched Reconstruction of the 19th century; and I firmly agree that it’s our common responsibility that to act to remediate this. I think education is a powerful weapon to bring opportunities and safety, so that’s where my focus is.

I guess the difference between someone like the Lemmy devs and you, and someone like me, is that I’m fully aware there are problems everywhere, but I won’t automatically associate someone’s nationality/residency to those problems; only what those people explicitly say about it. I initially considered that the issues people were having with the Lemmy devs were because they were not being US-centric, until I was linked to their past hateful posts on Reddit. I can’t believe they actually took questions on r/AskATankie; before that I was annoyed that people were calling them “tankies” because it sounded like a slur, I had no idea they actually identified as such. It’s the same feeling I get when I see Americans carrying a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag. So disheartening.

It is convenient to think of the world as divided in nationalities, a lot of things would be simpler. You need to realize that it’s a bit more complicated than that. China has a lot of successful high-scale services, with TikTok, Weibo, Alibaba, etc. It would be excellent if, for instance, ownership of Lemmy moved to a Chinese engineer (or a team of Chinese engineers of course) who helped with scaling those; provided it’s not someone with hateful view who self-identifies as a tankie. It doesn’t sound like a lot to ask.

Wherever you live, I am glad you are personally safe. I mean it for real. It’s better if you do things around you for those who aren’t, but I don’t resent people who don’t, we all do what we can.