The digital rights movement needs to become deliberately and intentionally inclusive. We need to actively engage with how technologies and the internet are racist, as well as how they perpetuate other oppressions through silence. We need to actively engage with how our digital rights movements protect whiteness, and through doing so come to create the foundation for racism.
Those of us who work as activists and researchers in the digital rights movement, whether from a gender, feminist, sexuality and/or queer lens, often assume that our work automatically protects us from being considered deeply problematic. We think that if we are aware and conscious of structures and systems as they relate to gender and sexuality, such as sexism, online gender-based violence, and homophobia, that we are progressive. But we are not if our work is not intersectional. We need to be deliberately inclusive of the multitude of lived experiences, not only of gender and sexuality.
We often speak of, and understand, technology to be embedded in socio-political contexts, and imbued with a number of power struggles and their violences. What we do not speak of is how we as the movement are also caught up in these contexts and struggles.
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