Gershom Bazerman gave some excellent advice for activism and teaching. His focus was on teaching Haskell and advocating for Haskell, but the advice is much more widely applicable and I recommend it to anyone interested in activism, social justice, or education. The piece has garnered a good deal of support on reddit— but, some people have expressed their impression that Gershom's advice is targeting a theoretical or future problem, rather than a very concrete and very contemporary one. I gave a reply there about how this is indeed a very real issue, not a wispy one out there in the distance. However, I know that a lot of people like me —i.e., the people who bear the brunt of these problems— tend to avoid reddit because it is an unsafe place for us, and I think my point is deserving of a wider audience. So I've decided to repeat it here:
This is a very real and current problem. (Regardless of whether things are less bad in Haskell communities than in other programming communities.) I used to devote a lot of energy towards teaching folks online about the ideas behind Haskell. However, over time, I've become disinclined to do so as these issues have become more prevalent. I used to commend Haskell communities for offering a safe and welcoming space, until I stopped feeling quite so safe and welcomed myself.
I do not say this to shame anyone here. I say it as an observation about why I have found myself pulling away from the Haskell community over time. It is not a deliberate act, but it is fact all the same. The thing is, if someone like me —who supports the ideology which gave rise to Haskell, who is well-educated on the issues at hand, who uses Haskell professionally, who teaches Haskell professionally, and most importantly: who takes joy in fostering understanding and in building communities— if someone like me starts instinctively pulling away, that's a problem.
There are few specific instances where I was made to feel unsafe directly, but for years there has been a growing ambiance which lets me know that I am not welcome, that I am not seen as being part of the audience. The ambiance (or should I say miasma?) is one that pervades most computer science and programming/tech communities, and things like dogmatic activism, dragon slaying, smarter-than-thou "teaching", anti-intellectualism, hyper-intellectualism, and talking over the people asking questions, are all just examples of the overarching problem of elitism and exclusion. The problem is not that I personally do not feel as welcomed as I once did, the problem is that many people do not feel welcome. The problem is not that my experience and expertise are too valuable to lose, it's that everyone's experience and expertise is too valuable to lose. The problem is not that I can't teach people anymore, it's that people need teachers and mentors and guides. And when the tenor of conversation causes mentors and guides to pull away, causes the silencing of experience and expertise, causes the exclusion and expulsion of large swaths of people, that always has an extremely detrimental impact on the community.