Child-rearing and knitting have traditionally been viewed as women’s work and therefore of scant value to society. Thankfully, shifting attitudes and a widening body of research into the complexity and usefulness of these realms are changing that. And this week, important players in both childhood education and the fiber arts demonstrated their influence and worth in another way, speaking out publicly and firmly against the Trump administration’s harmful attitudes and actions. I’d like to take a moment this Sunday morning to acknowledge the example set by Highlights for Children and ravelry.com.
Highlights for Children
Highlights is a children’s magazine that many readers are likely familiar with, its cheerful pages having graced supermarket checkout lines and dentist waiting rooms uninterruptedly since the 1980s. Originally founded in 1946, the magazine’s mission is “fun with a purpose,” and it is as respected among educators and parents as it is beloved among children.
On Tuesday, following several days of immigrant detention centers featuring in the news, Highlights went beyond educating and entertaining children to engaging with efforts to protect them, tweeting the following:
Highlights examined their core values and followed them to their logical conclusion in civic action. They used their voice, their line of communication with adults who in all likelihood are themselves involved in children’s lives, to advocate on behalf of those among “all children” who are currently suffering in concentration camps promoted and even celebrated by many in both our government and our communities. Let us hope that by appealing to one like-minded audience—adults who care about children—they might succeed in broadening the ranks of another like-minded audience, namely: those willing to speak out against and stand up to the administration on this issue.
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ravelry.com
Ravelry is a global online forum for knitting, crocheting, and other fiber arts where users can learn techniques, share projects, and access thousands of patterns. In their own words, they are an “inclusive, friendly website,” and like Highlights, they recently transformed their inclusive words into actual action, updating their user policy to ban posts expressing support for Donald Trump or the Trump administration:
New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration
Sunday, June 23rd 2019
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.
We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
Policy notes:
- You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
- We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
- We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
- We are not banning people for past support.
- Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
- Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.
You can help by flagging any of the following items if they constitute support for Trump or his administration:
- Projects: Unacceptable projects will be provided to the member or made invisible to others.
- Patterns: Unacceptable patterns will be returned to drafts.
- Forum posts: right now, only posts written after Sunday, June 23rd at 8 AM Eastern
- Profiles: Unacceptable avatars or profile text will be removed.
Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-po...
For whatever reason, Ravelry’s announcement spurred somewhat more journalistic interest than that of Highlights, and several articles quickly appeared in major publications discussing it. If you only have time to read one, I found TechCrunch’s The power of Ravelry’s stance against white supremacy reaches beyond the knitting community to be the most informative and insightful, offering a great rundown of the context surrounding inclusivity and yarn arts.
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There’s more where that came from
In the days since I first began preparing this diary, two more non-governmental entities have taken stands—albeit less firm ones—against the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, the self-styled “front page” of the internet, Reddit, announced they would be quarantining the subreddit forum The_Donald, after it was flagged for containing “threats of violence against police and public officials.” The offending posts were made in reference to the ongoing situation in Oregon involving a clutch of Republican state senators who fled not only the congressional chamber but the city, and the ensuing threats of militia-led attacks against the state Capitol building in support of them. Reddit users will still be able to access the forum, but they will now first see an explanatory popup message warning that the forum they are about to access has run afoul of Reddit’s user policy. Users can then simply click if they wish to continue on to the forum.
Twitter on Thursday put in place a similar technical tactic to deal with those who violate its own user policy. Previously, politicians (including the president) and other important public figures were given considerable leeway to make posts whose content did not meet community standards because their tweets were considered too “newsworthy” to censor in the same manner as regular citizen users’ posts. This split playing field has now been partly leveled, and those wishing to view a tweet that goes against site rules will first, like on Reddit, see a rectangle covering the tweet, warning that it violates Twitter policy and asking users if they would like to view it regardless. One click more will reveal the original tweet.
These opt-in warnings will likely do little to deter either posters or readers on these hugely popular online sites. And they will certainly add more fuel to the fire that is the debate surrounding the possible limits of free speech. But they are a welcome step in that whatever else they do or don’t accomplish, they demonstrate a willingness to at least try to figure out where lines of moral accountability might be drawn.
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It is encouraging to see these public influencers speak out loud and clear against the atrocities of the current administration and its supporters. Now wouldn’t it be great if more lawmakers and government officials, especially on the right, would show the same courage and forthrightness and do the same?