this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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[โ€“] 201dberg@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wasn't the name of the original "Dunk Tank" , and game itself, changed repeatedly over the years exactly to stop being super racist? Like, reading the wiki seems like "hey this carnival thing used to be pretty terrible and super racist as fuck but turns out people can enjoy it without being horrendously racist so we changed it up to not be that." At least that's the impression I got?

It feels like they are just being hyper libs and saying " actually sweety, trying to not be racist anymore is racist because racism existed in the past so it will always be racist no matter what." It makes no sense to me. Like " how dare you try to make a thing not racist instead of just banning it from all of existence forever." How many words, games, sports, etc had some undesirable characteristic to them at some point in their existence that was changed to not be as such? How many works of media have been readapted to have a more diverse cast when the original was made by some racist?

If there are other reasons like it being used as a front to just post reactionary shit disguised as "dunking" on conservatives and libs then that makes sense to me. Hell, we were having that problem on Lemmygrad some time ago with all the "shit liberals say" type coms popping up. If it's just the name though..... Idk, seems like then they are just stirring up shit to stir up shit. Which honestly, is pretty on par with Hexbear admins.

[โ€“] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 days ago

Not sure I follow your interpretation of the wikipedia article. The history it provides is very short and just ends at "dunk the n-word" being protested.

I personally could go either way with this. Maybe the name is now rendered innocuous by repeated usage in non-racist contexts but I also don't think it is worthwhile to rehabilitate traditions that have extremely racist roots. If someone wants to do a better analysis they would have to look at how dunk tanks are put into practice IRL. Maybe there is still a vestige of oppression that remains because of which unprivileged persons are dunked. Or maybe not.

It is also only one part of the reason. They probably want to change the site culture as well but that is for the admins and the users to sort out.