Second, treat people as individuals. For instance, don’t treat every person who belongs to an oppressed group as an authoritative mouthpiece of that group as a whole. People aren’t plugged into some kind of hive mind.

I started using Twitter more often when the first lockdown in February started. Originally it was because of the large number of scientists (geneticist and neuroscientists) that somehow decided that Twitter is their platform of choice to post preprints, communicate their results, and discuss them. And it was nice.

But it also showed me another side of the whole thing. It is a horrible platform for discussing more delicate topics. Even in "science Twitter" things were getting heated about topics like Numpy's paper with 26 male authors or how BLM lead to a wide "sudden" awareness that POC and minorities are under-represented in STEM and every principal investigator suddenly adding the sentence "... POC and minorities especially motivated" to their job offers.

I am not saying these decisions were bad. They are good. What I don't like is the way this groupthink deals with people trying to discuss these things.

This article from 2014 deals with some of these issues and makes a good point that I had to deal with sometimes. People of the "oppressed group" are not by definition know-it-all wells of wisdom about the oppressor-oppressed relationship.

It reminded me of a time where MidBurn, the local Burning Man event in Israel, was getting some momentum. The first and second events went well and were well received in Israeli society. However, the global Burning Man society was criticizing the Israeli organizing team that they cannot practice radical inclusion, a cornerstone of the Burning Man philosophy, because no Palestinians can join the event.

Apart from this being a stupid argument, because the MidBurn organizers cannot bend current Israeli laws to make it happen. What annoyed me the most was how the MidBurn org decided to deal with it and the effect it had.

The event in 2015 had about 8k participants. 5 of those were Arab-Israelis like myself. When criticized with the "but there are no Palestinians at MidBurn" the MidBurn, instead of arguing that it is not possible, decided to bring me and the other Arab-Israelis into the discourse and literally said, "look! We have Palestinians at MidBurn".

First, even though we are Palestinians, we do not represent the group the is actually talked about (the Palestinians living in the West Bank). Second, we do not even remotely represent the Arab-Israeli Palestinian society, let alone the one living in the West Bank or Gaza. We were basically social outcasts from mixed families that felt more comfortable in the Jewish society than in the Palestinian one. If you ask me, we are close to the last people to be representing the "Palestinian point" in this discussion.

We were basically used to diffuse the situation. And the worst thing was that it worked. We were waved like a flag of legitimacy for the MidBurn event. A way to ignore the political troubles in the country (which is a general problem with MidBurn and other burns, the "no politics at the burn" hidden rule), and the critics from the global Burning Man society were pleased...

Which brings me back to Twitter. The past few weeks/months had a surge in "Black in STEM" or "Black in Neuro" weeks where POC were given a platform to present themselves and their story. I was asking myself, is every one of them really representative of the problem that is faced? From what I understood, many of the people with tenure etc. are from the middle/upper class in the USA and mainly got there because of that status. But people still expected a story of oppressor and oppressed.

Don't understand me wrong. There is most probably a systemic issue in the states that leads to financial disparity based on race. Which in turn leads to less POCs at universities and in tenure positions. But I doubt that the problem is at the higher levels of education. Or am I mistaken?