Part 2 continued from #349:
The hastaggers capitalize both on this conflation, and this insecurity, by using this backlash and accusations of separatism as confirmation bias of their rhetoric to the 2nd discourse dwellers (2ndDDs), in an attempt to pull them over to the 1st discourse. They will pick certain content and piece together a narrative:.
When 2nd discourse participants attempt the aforementioned self validation of their identity, 1st discourse participants will seize on it, invoke posts of others telling them with "They don't have a culture", and other greatest hits delegitimizing their ethnoculture. Essentially signalling: 'Hey, come look at how they
really feel about us'. This pokes the aforementioned insecurity, while potentially invoking defensiveness and reactionism. With respect to the questioning of the authenticity of ethnoculture, It seen as having welcomed others into your house, they live there for a while and you feel you are all housemates, and one day while relaxed and having their feet up on the table, they say "this isn't even a proper house, my house is a real, actual house", and so on to the point of saying it's not even the owner's house in the first place.
2ndDDs essentially perceive a dynamic in which the openness of Black American culture leads to it being used as a public park, while other cultures are private property. Others can come to the park, use it however, set up whatever they need for recreation, and then go back to their private property at their leisure, and continue to come and go as they please. And if there is an attempt to "privatize the 'park', or any section of it" (gatekeeping), it is met with indignation from the 'park' users, "this 'park' doesn't belong you you, it belongs to everyone" which causes indignation in return. Even more indignation comes from the accusations of separatism or xenophobia despite Black American culture's openness and opposite of xenophobia being what led to the dynamic in the first place. Furthermore, the notion that gatekeeping is illegitimate reinforces the perception/insecurity that they are not seen as a legitimate people group.
There is a sense that the openness of Black American culture has been seen instead as exploitable weakness, not used in good faith, and that they have been played for suckers. People who they (2nd discourse folks) thought they were part of an overarching collective ingroup with, instead seem to actually have seen them as outgroups the entire time, all while benefiting from the association to, or labor of Black Americans.
All of the above, is the perception that 1st discourse participants carefully curate with content they have collected (*with help from the aformentioned algorythmic amplified ragebait, and other things taken out of context), and then once a solid foundation is established, it is what they build their camp upon. And it is then that they then bring with them all the antagonistic elements that you have mentioned in your post. They open the mouth of their target audience by invoking their insecurities, and then feed them to amplify them in a vicous cycle.
This perception gets reinforced and corrupted until you have ridiculous statements like some responses to the tweet in the original post of this thread saying that a black person apparently cannot being able to speak on black issues, out of some form of overcompensating, belated and misplaced gatekeeping.
Although 1st Discourse "hashtaggers" are a minority as we have agreed upon, they compensate for this and assist in observers doing the previously mentioned conflation of them as "the face of a now
unified discourse" by radicalizing as many 2nd discourse dwellers as possible. They do this until said people are reduced essentially to attack dogs that lash out at any perceived slight, in some cases, purposefully punching below the belt and being as cruel as possible in a sort of scorched earth policy. And then you cannot tell the difference between the two discourses. This leaves out the existence of majority of 2nd discourse dwellers who are not radicalized at all, and the 3rd party element of the population composed of those who are not even involved in online discourse at all (majority of population/grasstouchers). Unfortunately, this only escalates the situation as the recieving end of the scored earth policy uses instances of extreme lashing out as a poster for the entire demographic, and then proceeds to returns fire. You see this in people making declarative statements about entire populations, and their bibliography is "lol I saw some posts on Twitter/tiktok" AKA chronically online. Originally both sides would probably never engage in such rhetoric to each other, but now feel they must compensate for the other's cruelty. By the way this is not "both siderism". I am just breaking down the anatomy of reactionism.
I'm still annoyed since my original response was way more cohesive and covered more stuff, but I felt you deserved a response by now, even if it is unfortunately a wall of text. Later.
