User talk:AmorLucis/sandbox

Creation

I've created this page so you have a space in which to work on your proposed content. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:44, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants, I am getting continuous pushback from editors, who are even entirely rejecting the two sources that you approved and recommended I "tweak" for inclusion.

Since it appears this edit is going to be held to an unusually high bar, I am working with reputable scholars to create bulletproof citations that will meet the inequitable standards being placed on this topic. Naturally, that will take time.

I think it's naive to think that the only problem here is "sources." There has been explicitly stated politically motivated pushback against including Black women's history and perspective in this article.

AmorLucis (talk) 22:04, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm quite sure the culture of WP has contributed significantly to the problems you've experienced. It's normal for editors, especially editors in sensitive topics to push back hard against anything they see as a possible detriment. And it's a result of many editors' dedication to impartiality that you will quite frequently see liberal editors push back hard against what they perceive as liberal POV-pushing as they overcompensate for their own known biases.

If you have evidence of someone explicitly saying that they're opposed to your edits for "political" reasons, you should share that, as we generally take a very firm stance against any sort of racism or sexism (and political pushback against including content about black women would qualify as both). Expressing racism, even obliquely, is usually grounds for indefinitely blocking an editor. See WP:NONAZIS and WP:NORACISTS, two essays I wrote, the former of which is widely cited, including as a rationale by which administrators have indefinitely blocked editors.

But the rules of WP are such that the only way to handle the problem in a situation like this is to address their complaints. This isn't something we necessarily have to do to their satisfaction, but we must do it to any degree reasonable.

I'm going to copy over the suggested text I wrote on my talk page along with the ref as a starting point for the draft here. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:43, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants "If you have evidence of someone explicitly saying that they're opposed to your edits for "political" reasons, you should share that,"

On the contrary, when I DID point that out, I was called "abusive" and "disruptive" and eventually blocked. Here are the quotes from the talk page and the Teahouse page, explicitly stating, out loud, that women's perspectives "dilute" this history and should not be included, period.

From the Juneteenth talk page:

"it is terrible injustice to attempt to dilute ending chattel slavery, as chattel slavery was a particularly unjust racist system"

"It would be morally, ethically, and academically wrong to include it."

"the false equivalence of other systems with chattel slavery is used by racists to deny the terrible system of chattel slavery, and its generational effects, by making the argument that whites too (here women) are/were in slavery."

Including Black women leader's advocacy for women's rights "leads to the perverse proposition that it was somehow liberation that racist laws of chattel slavery barred enslaved women from marriage."

"Racism is explicit in your ascribing to "African American men" and "African American women" what Juneteenth means to African American women and men." (one of many explicit personal attacks on my character)

and from the Teahouse forum

"If you put the male versus female bit into what should be an article commemorating emancipation, it waters down and weakens a historic and incredibly important thing:"

These arguments are not about sources, but about people's belief that it's inappropriate to include Black women's unique perspective as part of Black history because it dilutes that history. The Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day articles include Native American perspectives. The 19th Amendment article includes race perspectives. It is only women who are being treated as a coatrack issue. Editors do not even want to include that Juneteenth honors women leaders who spoke out for women's rights, because that's "too much feminism." But--beauty pageants? Sure! We can include those "female-centric" celebrations.

Can you not see that a certain type of women's voice and a certain type of history (women's) is being treated differently here?

Add to that the editors who tried to misrepresent what coverture was by quoting what academics said about coverture in the 20th century, not the 19th century, which is also bad faith debate.

I was accused of being racist, callous, whataboutism, wanting to "Right Great Wrongs" and going to other forums to "get the answer I wanted." These are all personal attacks and accusations of bad faith on my part by other editors. When I posted on another editor's talk page to stop posting personal attacks on my talk page, I was blocked for 31 hours for being "disruptive." When I appealed the block, multiple editors ALSO said I was being disruptive and refused to reverse it.

I have been showing this debate to academics outside of Wikipedia (because I am working with them to create bulletproof citations) and they are outraged at the above comments and how I have been personally attacked not only by other editors, but by admins who should have been stopping the attacks against me, not gaslighting me more by blocking me for setting boundaries against those attacks.

AmorLucis (talk) 14:19, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay, when you said that arguments against your inclusion were "explicitly politically motivated", I imagined comments along the lines of accusing you of liberal advocacy or trying to "minimize the problems men/whites face", things along those lines. The concerns you quoted aren't politically motivated, though they're concerns that play a part in politics. Instead, the motivation there seems to be motivated by a desire for neutrality. They were objections to things you seem to be saying, both at talk and in your proposed content, not to the content you and I have actually discussed.

This is a common problem, when we're communicating only in text. There's a lot of misunderstandings, and it's easy for such misunderstandings to carry us away. Let me offer you some advice as an experience Wikipedian: Let it go.

They might have been wrong, and the way you were treated might have been unfair, but WP is a big, uncaring machine that only takes from editors, and gives nothing in return but the satisfaction that comes from improving it. It does not care how well any particular editor is treated, it does not care for fairness or justice towards its editors, it only cares that article space is constantly improved.

There's nothing to be gained from dwelling on the way you were treated, and doing so is highly likely to undermine your efforts to improve the project. So the best thing to do is to focus on creating some improved content, whose addition can be done without giving people predisposed to sense malfeasance in your editing an excuse to object.

Also, note the formatting changes I made to your previous comment: I added two levels of indentation and removed the extra whitespaces (they're only necessary to create paragraph breaks when not using indentation). See here for an example of how to structure discussions on WP. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 14:39, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants I'm not "dwelling." You invited me to "share."

Creating straw arguments out of thin air to discredit someone's nuanced argument is, by definition, bad faith and suggests political bias. And we are going to have to agree to disagree on whether intersectional history is creating neutrality or "original research." I say that attempts to prevent its inclusion are, by nature, politically motivated to maintain an inherent bias.

Now, back to the edit. Thank you for continuing to work on this edit. I changed the order of Truth and Wells for chronology (Wells was decades after Truth) and added Frances Harper, who was Truth's contemporary around the time of the original Juneteenth.

I changed the language to say that Juneteenth marked "a shift" towards freedom, citizenship and suffrage for Black men because it was a series of events that caused that shift from the Emancipation Proclamation to Juneteenth to the Constitutional Amendments--all of which are already referenced in the Juneteenth article.

Anticipated objections to this edit:

1) That Black men were not granted "suffrage" in 1870 with the 15th Amendment because of Jim Crow laws. But Black men were granted suffrage in 1870 and the first Jim Crow laws did not start until 1877. In fact, during this time in Reconstruction, between 1870 and 1877, two Black males were elected to Congress. So, yes, the initial effect of Emancipation was suffrage for Black men and not Black women.

2) One editor on the neutrality page is rejecting the Tallahassee Democrat article claiming it is more of an opinion piece than a news article. Quoting that editor, the article "has bylines and statements that make it appear as a statement from Della Walker Chapter #86, and not an independent piece written by a Democrat journalist. Eg it would be like an op-ed piece, which again we can't really use for reliability."

3) I've heard more than once that "one" source is not enough to show "due weight" to include the historical reality of 51% of the Black population.

4) I've also heard the argument "Today, its clear that the Juneteenth applies universally to all black persons in the US, not singling out men or women or any other segment of this population." But...it's also clear today that Thanksgiving Day universally applies to and is celebrated by all Americans, yet the Wiki article on that holiday includes the unique historical perspective of Native Americans.

Finally, the article as is is inconsistent, sometimes using "African-American" and sometimes "black" (not capitalized). To be consistent, I've removed the capitalization of the world "black" in the edit.

AmorLucis (talk) 15:14, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the "due weight" issue (point 3): in the thinking of many long-time Wikipedians, "due weight" is not about the size of the population to which a topic pertains, but the number of sources that discuss that topic and the depth in which they do so. Yes, this can lead to silly conclusions sometimes. It is also an example of Wikipedians using ordinary language in a specialized, quasi-legalistic way that can be quite opaque to those not marinated in this peculiar subculture. "Notability" is another example of this. When an article is put up for deletion, we typically debate whether or not its subject is "notable", a question that is similar to but not the same as whether the subject is noteworthy in colloquial speech. (Over the years, this project has developed a Byzantine assemblage of policies and guidelines, generally without any centralized planning, and sometimes in response to things going badly wrong. For example, the Biographies of living persons policy was introduced as a result of the Seigenthaler controversy. Usually the guidelines make sense when you think about the limitations of the project, but they can look overbearing all the same.) Sometimes the way to proceed is just to find more and better sources. Academic books by historians are typically more impressive than news stories, for example, since the latter might only have a brief mention of a point as part of providing background for a recent event. XOR'easter (talk) 18:57, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I also anticipate pushback related to item 2, concerns about the source. It does appear to be written as a press release and not a newspaper article. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 04:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)