Racism in online Toki Pona communities (Blaugust #7)

[packbat]

We talk a lot about the conlang Toki Pona because we think it is delightful. We haven't talked a lot about our experience with the online Toki Pona community, once we moved beyond watching jan Misali videos and talking to friends of friends.

It was bad. It was real bad.

In no particular order:

• We joined one Discord for help making a set of toki pona characters (toki pona has a standard one-symbol-per-word writing system, sitelen pona). That Discord had a drive-by spamming racist shit in every channel, because they have no Discord airlock system and apparently the invite is just out there.
• (One of the mods was initially upset because they thought they wouldn't be able to see the racist spam. I ... cannot understand this but whatever.)
• We finished our sitelen pona emoji set. It got adopted by someone translating alt-right webcomics into Toki Pona. They tagged us on Twitter.
• As a condition for using our sitelen pona set, we require that communities moderate adequately against a number of bigotries, including against meme forms of bigotry. Basic stuff, like not using language that was appropriated from AAVE by white supremacists, and not making memes with antisemitic stock characters. This feels like a low bar. The one time a Toki Pona mod reached out to ask if their community (a different Discord) could use our emoji, they admitted that they could not clear it.
• On yet another Discord, the second Toki Pona Discord we joined, someone made a post suggesting a nimi sin - a Toki Pona neologism - based on the n-word. The mods took no action beyond scolding for almost three months. Even when specifically prompted about it.

Now, this is a blog post written in mid-2023 about events occuring mid-2023. You, dear reader, might find the Toki Pona communities you encounter to be different. Our experience with tokiponists around our side of fedi (which actually bans people who adopt white supremacist memes, like functional antiracist communities do) has been positive. Toki Pona, the language, has not been hostile to us.

But ... listen, if you recommend people read Sonja Lang's book about Toki Pona without mentioning that there's a strong theme of jan Sonja's religion through it, then that's a big thing to leave out but not a big deal - there are a lot of atheists, including us, speaking Toki Pona, and jan Sonja seems like a nice person and explicitly queer-positive. But a history of racism is a big deal. And it's a big deal that Toki Pona communities are going to have to deal with, and keep dealing with for so long they get sick of having to keep dealing with it. That's how wrestling with a racist history works.

And if you're just learning Toki Pona in 2023? Stars, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But stay safe. jan sin o, o awen e kon sina.