Reverse this
The TODO group is an industry body that appears to be trying to define community best practices or something. I don't really know what their backstory is and whether they're trying to do meaningful work or just provide a fig leaf of respectability to organisations that dislike being criticised for doing nothing to improve the state of online communities but don't want to have to actually do anything, and their initial work on codes of conduct was, perhaps, suboptimal. But they do appear to be trying to improve things - this commit added a set of inappropriate behaviours, and also clarified that reverseisms were not actionable behaviour.
At which point Reddit lost its shit, because Reddit is garbage. And now the repository is a mess of white men attempting to explain how any policy that could allow them to be criticised is the real racism.
Fuck that shit.
Being a cis white man who's a native English speaker from a fairly well-off background, I'm pretty familiar with privilege. Spending my teenage years as an atheist of Irish Catholic upbringing in a Protestant school in a region of Northern Ireland that made parts of the bible belt look socially progressive, I'm also pretty familiar with the idea that that said privilege doesn't shield me from everything bad in life. Having privilege isn't a guarantee that my life will be better, in the same way that avoiding smoking doesn't mean I won't die of lung cancer. But there's an association in both cases, one that's strong enough to alter the statistical likelihood in meaningful ways.
And that inherently affects discussions about race or gender or sexuality. The probability that I've been subject to systematic discrimination because of these traits is vanishingly small. In the communities this policy is intended to cover, I'm the default. It's very difficult for any minority to exercise power over me. "You're white, you wouldn't understand" isn't fundamentally about my colour, it's about the fact that my colour means I haven't been subject to society trying to make my life more difficult at every opportunity. A community that considers saying that to be racist is a community that will never change the default, a community that will never be able to empower people who didn't grow up with that privilege. A code of conduct that makes it clear that "reverse racism" isn't grounds for complaint makes it clear that certain conversations are legitimate and helps ensure we have the framework we need to gradually change that default, and as such is better than one that doesn't.
(comments disabled because I don't trust any of you) comments