All right folks, let's strap in and do this.

Sixteen days ago, we had a post titled Anyone else really tired of the way Indian Men are spoken about?. This post very quickly became a microcosm of the problems that this subreddit has when we talk about race. A lot of people felt hurt or let down by comments that they saw on that thread. Since then, there has been some follow-up discussion on the sub itself and a lot of concerned criticism in modmail. Firstly, I would like to give a big thank you to everybody who did reach out to us; your input was really important and I've drawn on it heavily for this write up. I am keeping usernames anonymous by default, but if you ask I will edit this post to give you credit.

This is going to break down into three sections. "What went wrong?", "Why did it go wrong?", and "What do we need to do differently?" I am going to be as even handed as I possibly can be, but I am just one person with my own perspective. With that in mind, the rule about meta complaints and complaints about moderation is suspended for this post. You guys all need to also contribute to how we move on from this. (Although I will point out that the rules around personal attacks do still apply - "Delta_Baryon shags badgers" is still a rule-breaking comment).

OK, that's our housekeeping out of the way, so let's dig into this.

What went wrong?

On the 8th of March, /u/CraptainToad made a post expressing his unhappiness with how men of Indian descent and/or nationality are commonly stereotyped as creepy perverts. It was a well-written and well-considered piece, in which he touched on the need for Desi women to speak about their own experience, but also his own dissatisfaction at being subject to negative stereotypes by otherwise socially liberal white people. He was particularly unhappy, being born and raised in Canada, at being held responsible for events in a country thousands of miles away, over which he has no influence.

This was a difficult post to moderate, about which I had this to say at the time:

I am going to put my hands up right now and say we're performing a difficult balancing act in this thread. On one hand, we don't want to tell people who've been sexually harassed or have received pervy messages online that it never happens. On the other hand, the stereotype of the "pervy foreigner" is real, pervasive and needs talking about (I'm looking at you, Big Bang Theory). On yet another hand, we also need to make sure that people talking about their personal experience do only talk about personal experience and don't fall into the trap of lazy racist stereotypes.

We are doing our best and would like to call on you all to be as sensitive as you can. We are probably not going to make the right call 100% of the time, so please don't hesitate to modmail us if there's something you'd like to talk about.

17 hours later and 479 comments later, the post was locked in order to give the mods a break. During that time, a number of comments leaning on common racist stereotypes and tropes stayed up and highly upvoted. These were all removed by the time the thread was locked. However, the fact they were so visible in the first place was a jarring and unsettling experience for our South Asian subscribers.

The racism itself was not generally overt or in your face and didn't typically use slurs. I'm going to quote now from modmail to summarise how this kind of racism manifested itself.

Some common themes are:

• Casual racism in the form of "jokes" that often regard South Asians as "dirty" or "uncivilised."
• Not differentiating between Indians and the Western diaspora, aka "perpetual foreigner." This often takes the form of demands that a Western-born Indian person apologize on behalf of "their country" or "their culture".
• Bad faith discussions about India's cultural problems (particularly regarding "rape culture" and Indian men). Of course not all of these discussions are in bad faith, many are stories about personal experience or general factual solutions-oriented commentary. However, I feel that you become quite adept at recognizing which comments are not actually made in good faith when you're a minority.

To expand on that last point, "bad faith" to me means that the discussion is primarily driven by "dislike of the enemy" rather than genuine concern or empathy for "the victim(s)". A good example of bad faith is the discourse about black Americans whenever the topic of anti-Asian coronavirus racism is brought up. It's very obvious to me that the posters are more interested in their anti-black narratives than actual justice or empathy for Asian Americans. Many such commenters try very hard to conceal their racist agenda in a veneer of "justice", and try very hard to pretend to have empathy for Asian Americans as they spew their hateful rhetoric. However I would imagine that it is quite obvious to anyone on the receiving end of that rhetoric that this is simply racism in sheep's clothing.

The worst "bad" faith commenter I encountered was one who was extremely condescending and dismissive of OP's experience. He kept arguing that OP should not be allowed to complain because "India does have a huge cultural misogyny problem", and that his problems paled in comparison to the victims of the cultural misogyny problem. "Perspective, man", the commenter concluded. In perhaps the most egregious comment of all, this person compared his experience as a white man of being automatically labelled racist towards black Americans with the stereotyping as a minority man that OP faces. I am someone who hardly ever engages in internet arguments, but this comment made me so upset that I was prompted to respond. I do believe my comment to this person was quite civil, but I was definitely much more enraged by this person than my comment let on.

What we're dealing with here is negative stereotypes of South Asians, a propensity to treat people of immigrant backgrounds as "perpetual foreigners" regardless of their actual background, often concealed by a professed interest in fighting misogyny.

Why did it go wrong?

Having read your modmails over the last week and reflected on this, I think there are three major issues that came together simultaneously to create a kind of "perfect storm." None of these issues are especially new or unique to this thread, but this thread did really showcase what the problems are.

• This kind of racism is not explicitly mentioned in our subreddit's rules
• Our moderation tools and strategy are not well suited to detecting subtler forms of prejudice
• There is a lack of racial diversity in the subreddit's userbase and modteam

Our rules regarding racism, which have remained broadly the same since 2015, read as follows:

Slurs and hatespeech are prohibited, including but not limited to racial bigotry, sexism, ableism, attacks based on sexuality (including sexual experience, orientation, and identity), and uncalled-for personal attacks. We count on our subscribers to report violations of this rule.

This is very explicit when it comes to calling someone the N-word, but it's less clear that it's also against the rules to hold someone personally responsible for the actions of others in their ethnic group. This means that comments like that tend not to be reported to the moderators, as people don't realise that's an option. Paradoxically, the first time we find out about them is when people respond angrily and then those comments tend to get reported for incivility.

This leads into my next point, talking about our moderation tools. I can't talk in detail about our exact automoderator setup, because then people will use that knowledge to bypass it. However, I can say that we have the ability to scan comments for keywords and flag them to us. This means that if you call someone the N-word in /r/MensLib, you will be found and banned pretty much immediately. However, automod is only so clever. It can't decode the meaning of your comment, the societal context in which it's being said, and flag up any racist undertones to us. What this means is that our main way of detecting these sorts of comments is through user reports. If a comment is not reported or even if it's just posted at a time when not many mods are available, then it's possible for it to stay up much longer than if it simply contained racial slurs.

This then leads into the final point, there is a lack of racial diversity among our subscribers and mod base. According to our 2019 user survey, about 83.9% of /r/MensLib's userbase responded "No" to the question "Are you a person of colour?" About 2/3 of our subscribers are American, so if we were roughly similar to the USA in its demographics, we would expect that percentage to be somewhere between 61% and 77% depending on the self identification of white Hispanic and Latino people. What this means is that our subscribers are going to be slower to recognise these tropes, having not had the life experience to do so, which in turn makes them less likely to hit the report button. The exact racial makeup of the moderation team has varied as different mods come and go, but it's always been majority white and it is mostly white at time of writing. This in turn has meant that, in spite of our best efforts, we have missed racist undertones in comments that do get reported to us and that they've stayed up longer than they should have done.

In summary, racist comments with subtle or less overt types of racism tend to be overlooked in this subreddit, because the rules are not explicit enough in banning them, we rely on user reports to be informed of them, but our users and mods are not necessarily good at recognising them.

What do we need to do differently?

This is the point in the discussion where I am asking for everybody's input. We should all think about how we can the sub better and contribute our ideas. I have some of my own, which I'll go into now, but they shouldn't be taken as definitive yet.

Firstly, we need to rewrite the rules section covering racism. I haven't come up with a new rule yet, because I want to hear everyone's input, but here's what I think makes a good rule. It should start with a simple statement of our goals, what that rule is there to achieve. That should be followed up by an explanatory paragraph. Finally, it can also be useful to find a handful of easily identifiable behaviours to sanction. For example, when dealing with transphobia, we would often impose a temporary rule in a thread threatening to ban anyone who stated or implied that cishet men who dated trans women were slightly gay. The reason this was useful is that it was very easy to apply and that people who broke this rule also tended to be transphobic in other, more subtle ways, that would be harder to define. Here are some examples that spring to mind:

• Blaming individuals from ethnic minorities for the actions of foreign governments they don't necessarily support
• Equating modern conversations around gender with historical oppression along racial lines (i.e. "Just change the word 'man' to 'Black' or 'Jew'")
• Relating an anecdote about an individual of an ethnic group as if it were representative of that entire group

Secondly, we need to diversify the mod team. If you would like to throw your hat into the ring and help us out, then applications are always open. Send us a message here telling us a bit about yourself and why you're interested in men's issues. If you can be active while moderators in Europe and the USA are asleep, then that's a big plus. The last time we did a big recruitment drive, we were interrupted by the outbreak of a global pandemic, which prevented us replying to some of your applications. If that happened to you, I am terribly sorry and please consider applying again.

Finally, we need all of you to keep a sharp eye out for this kind of racism from now on. We can't read every single comment made on the subreddit anymore, so we're counting on our subscribers to make us aware of potentially rulebreaking comments. If you think something looks out of place, it probably is and we just haven't seen it yet. For something that's easily and clearly in violation of one of our rules, there's the report button. If there's something that's less egregious, but makes you feel uncomfortable, then sometimes it's easier to modmail us, so we can have a discussion.

Thank you all for reading and I look forward to hearing what you all have to say.