Etsy (certainly back then, afaik they've sort-of given up on that by now: hard to police and bad for growth - turns out mass-production gives more turnover) was very much about things hand-made by seller. The promise was that you don't get people selling stuff they bought from factories on Ali[baba|Express] and claiming it's something they've handmade - in 2013 they had just allowed outsourcing production steps for the first time, if you documented who did exactly what step, so no buying things (handmade or not) and just reselling them. Nevertheless, that's what you get, X shops selling the exact same thing they supposedly made (or selling them with small customizations done, which was OK according to the rules but plenty people still disliked), and Etsy was pushing "integrity updates" and promising to better police this. And that wasn't in any way about Chinese people, because obviously if people are reselling massproduced stuff the problem is not the worker who made them. Nor are Chinese artisans selling their own product a problem, but I don't think that was a large group on the market anyways.
Of course nobody should resell things on Etsy that they merely bought, but there was nothing to suggest that Hoy was complaining about reselling; instead, she seemed to be suggesting that Chinese artisans who mass-produced things shouldn't sell them on Etsy. My reading of Hoy's reasoning at the time was "artisan = white person", so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
Rejecting the leading question clarified that quite nicely. And really, the jump of "could she be talking about the main Etsy point of complaints right now? No, way more likely she's just racist" is a crap starting assumption to make.
How am I supposed to know what the "main Etsy point of complaints" is, or was? I haven't talked to Kellan in years, I don't know if he even still works there.
I do pretty frequently see people making the "Chinese = impure" association, though. Maybe I should spend less time on places like this website, which would diminish my exposure to that kind of crap.
I don't think "reread what I wrote" clarifies anything. It leaves the interpretation entirely up to the reader, which is helpful when you're dog-whistling racism, counterproductive if you're trying to clearly express an idea that someone actually misunderstood.
So, I think your interpretation of the original tweet is plausible, particularly given the context you have—which I didn't have. But Hoy's response undermines your interpretation pretty strongly.
> so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
What would be the point of clarifying to you if you jumped in with those assumptions? She doesn’t owe you anything. Blocking someone like that seems like the right call.
You asked, "So you purposely provoked her instead of asking for reasonable clarification?"
No, to "provoke questioning" is to induce someone to re-examine something they thought they knew; it's not the same as "provoking a person", which means to intentionally offend them, which I wasn't doing. In fact, as you can see, I was very careful to phrase my questioning in as deferential and inoffensive a way as possible. And the particular way I was trying to provoke questioning was specifically by asking for reasonable clarification—clarification which apparently led somewhere she didn't want to go. It's good to see that she's now explicitly rejecting racism against Chinese people, which is something she wasn't willing to do eight years ago.
So you think you were trying to teach me with socratic dialogue by calling me racist? rather than asking, oh I don’t know, “what kind of goods”?
You made your decision — you called me racist then and now — and now you’re dishonestly trying to pretend it was more complicated and actually for my own good, really, when you think about it.
It’s super transparent tho so I appreciate all your replies that show just how twisted you’ve got it
I can’t reply to your nth nested comment so I’ll do it here.
You did call me racist, just like you did today. That’s how I knew EXACTLY which tweet it was 8 years later. Tweets can be deleted. I certainly don’t remember YOU as a person, you’re nobody to me.
You are being dishonest. You consistently saying things about me that are untrue. There was no racist tweet, I didn’t block Star — just you — and I didn’t flag your posts, among other lies.
You are using loaded questions and statements to try to assassinate my character.
You’re claiming I abuse people by blocking them.
You think you’re entitled to my tweets and attention. You fantasize we have some sort of relationships where I owe you conversation.
You’re obsessed with something that happened nearly a decade ago.
Bottom line: You need to stop talking about me and to me. I told you stop already and I’m telling you again: Stop.
I didn't actually call you racist then, as anyone who reads the Twitter thread can see; it's easy to see that the things that I'm saying are true, and the things that you're saying are not true. Even Star didn't call you racist. But (if I recall correctly) I knew that the line of questioning would quickly lead to you either having to take an explicitly racist position (which you'd probably be uncomfortable with) or strategizing on how to reduce the impact of racism (which you'd be even more uncomfortable with, if you were racist).
It's true that instead of asking, "What kind of goods?" I asked you whether you thought Etsy was a reasonable venue for Chinese artisans to sell their wares, which seems to me like a question you could have easily answered by explaining what kind of goods, saying something like "Of course, but people in North Carolina are reselling injection-molded Chinese toys like https://t.co/something." Instead, you blocked us both for eight years and counting, so I concluded that the discussion was leading someplace you didn't want to go, so you actually were just racist.
And now you're responding to me telling the story of how you treat people by smearing me as "dishonest" and "weird", which seems entirely in keeping with the kind of aggressive behavior that the whole discussion thread is about.
I really don't think that kind of behavior is the kind of behavior we strive for here, although I guess probably whoever is flagging all of my comments disagrees with that.
