The woman behind an early Facebook post that helped spark baseless rumors about Haitians eating pets told NBC News that she feels for the immigrant community.
The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.
None of that means you can’t be racist.
It certainly doesn’t. But in the absence of evidence in either direction, I think it’s most reasonable to not assume the worst of people.
The evidence that shes racist is the incredibly racist post she made.
Evidence which wasn’t available to the participants of the conversation at the time. With only what we see in the article, there’s no reason to believe that this post she made was racist.
There is evidence of her being a racist piece of shit though.
https://lemmy.ca/post/28915538/11651615
I’ve rephrased this comment more explicitly and concretely here. Feel free to read through the rest of that thread. I’d rather not repeat myself unless you have something new to add.
You’re trying to save face in the same way this racist piece of shit is trying to save face: badly.
Your comment is a great example of the kind of biases I’m telling everyone to avoid. You misunderstood my initial message, then decided to cling on to that interpretation despite clarifications.
In any case, if you have feedback (e.g. what made the comment unclear, or how you interpreted it), I’d appreciate hearing about it so I can improve my writing. I’m not always aware of the hidden meanings non-autistic people pull out of words that weren’t intended to have any.
I understood your message
Blah blah blah we don’t know she’s a racist because weh weh weh random bullshit about missing context.
Yes we do. She’s a racist shitbag. The context is her being a racist shitbag writing a racist shitbag post on social media. The post has been displayed on various news sources and visible to anyone with a passing interest in the subject.
Her only remorse is that her casual racism turned out to be exposed to the public and the racist in chief is putting the spotlight on her racist shitbaggery.
The human world is based on purposefully creating and maintaining inequality to enable exploitation. This is empirically verifiable. It is therefore reasonable to assume that most humans do not act based on morality, but instead out of convenience and/or apathy.
Get back to me when there are no hungry children, then I will be ready to reassess the evidence.
You can believe what you want about human nature, but consider how well society would function if it was acceptable to make baseless accusations and act on them as if they were facts.
I do consider how well society functions, and I don’t think it is successful.
And so you’ll improve it by throwing around random accusations?
How is “the lady who made an extremely racist post online might be racist” a random accusation, exactly?
Bolded the baseless accusations. In the context of my initial comment in this thread, we didn’t have access to this post, so no one actually knew if it was actually racist.
In the context of the original comment you made in this thread, we knew she had made the post. You even reference her talking about the post she made. That post is, in fact, racist. So the facts you’re trying to point to are-
There’s nothing baseless about either of those statements, so there’s nothing baseless about stating she is, in fact, probably a racist. And your arguments about giving someone (who admitted they made the racist post) the “benefit of the doubt” are arguments for giving a person, who made a racist statement, the benefit of the doubt, about being racist.
Accusing others of making a baseless accusation against an innocent hold zero water when these facts are evident. I am pointing at the basis.
Looking back on my two previous posts in this thread, I have not accused any individual of anything. Nor do I think I can improve a human world specifically designed to hurt humans all by myself. All I can do is refrain from hurting others - this is not an action which, by itself, changes the moral behaviour of the majority.
You, in fact, are the one throwing an accusation. You might be doing this, ironically, out of a desire to improve the world. Feel free to ask me towards the end of the lifespan whether I have noticed a difference due to your efforts.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/10659257
Is this not written in support of treadful’s comment and in disagreement to my response? If not, then I have no idea what you were getting at.
Ah, yes, you do live mostly in a world that you simulate inside your head. You probably do this in order to ignore the fact that you are participating in a human world which is purposefully organised by humans in order to hurt most humans. Carry on, I’ll leave you to it.