Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta <anasuya@whoseknowledge.org> wrote:_______________________________________________Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Harassment
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019/ and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-all/
--Anasuya Sengupta+44 7367 868585Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us allThere can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.(bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/VMQIF6TJ46VLN6YSW5OKL6CXQ5J6BBTV/
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org--_______________________________________________Maggie DennisShe/her/hersVice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/ZWHJBDIGSGFBXHTIAGIR3YJA2HTIDSJO/
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org