2020 Geek-A-Long: Gone Rogue

Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of the Geek-A-Long! I had originally planned to fiercely fangirl over The Adventure Zone’s Amnesty campaign, but now I’m going to save that for later in the year. In light of some of the epic nonsense I saw on the internet, I’m going to take our square’s advice and go rogue. This week, I’d like you to do me a favor and spend some time thinking about racism in the knitting community, or at least read this post.

If you follow me on social media, you already know where I stand. The Geek-A-Long is, always has been, and always will be a safe space. Our community is amazing and welcoming. We don’t even have to police it since the kinds of people that stick around here are pretty cool. Unfortunately, it also means that it’s easy to get complacent and forget how awful things are in other spaces. We all have a responsibility to be aware of what’s happening in our community at large and to speak out about it. So in that spirit, we need to talk about “Green Socks.”

I know that some of you don’t spend much time on social media, especially Instagram. So I’m going to give you a quick recap of the stuff you may not have seen on Ravelry. It’s not comprehensive, but “Green Socks” require context: 

• A little over a year ago, Karen of the Fringe Association wrote a polarizing blog post about a planned trip to India. Her words prompted a number of BiPoC knitters to respond, asking her to reconsider her words as they reinforced the idea of brown people being “others.” You can read her apology here: (https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/12/words-matter/). 
• Some people were upset that Karen apologized. (Most supremacists don’t see themselves as racist. These are the especially dangerous ones since you don’t always see them coming.) They became enraged at the BiPoC women that had addressed their concerns to Karen. A yarn dyer, Tuskenknits, was particularly vocal at this time and treated those BiPoC Knitters as if they were cyberbullying, and released a line of yarn colors intended to mock the people speaking out. Colorways included names like “othering” and “sitting with my discomfort”.  
• Things got pretty heated.
• A designer named Nathan (you probably know him as Sockmatician) wrote a tone-deaf post claiming ownership of the hashtag “#diversknitty” and told people they weren’t allowed to use his hashtag unless they had something nice to say. That’s an oversimplification, but trust me, it was a rough post to read. It was a caricature of tone-policing. When that got the obvious response, he doubled down and claimed to have been put in the hospital due to the extreme stress from the negative comments. At the time he was allegedly in the hospital, he was seen at a book signing. Then, he went to a yarn festival and verbally attacked a woman of color, who asked him about the post.
• Somewhere in all of this Ravelry took a stand against racism and cyberbullying in response to The Deplorable Knitter. Seriously guys, that’s not even me calling her names, that’s her actual user name! Deplorable was upset that Rav wouldn’t let her keep her hateful nonsense on their site or let her followers dox other users.

Like I said, not comprehensive but those are the major events that led to the current climate in the knitting community on social media. The events are complex, but the moral isn’t. Either you acknowledge problems, speak out about racism and prejudice, and support marginalized people or you don’t. 

I think about privilege a lot. Jac and her husband are both latinx to varying degrees. Growing up, I witnessed countless incidences of microaggressions against her, and I’ve watched people release visible sighs of relief when they’ve discovered that Mr. & Mrs. Rivera are white-passing. Seeing the way people treat us differently has made me very aware of my own whiteness. I have Psoriatic Rheumatoid Arthritis (PA), which is a largely invisible disability. Since people can’t “tell” I’m disabled, I tend to encounter a lot of ableism from people who don’t realize I’m one of the people they are discriminating against. And each time I think about how much worse it would be for Jac or her husband if one of them had PA instead of me. I may have to deal with ableism, but I deal with it from a position of privilege. 

The mere mention of privilege makes some people so afraid and defensive that they see themselves as victims of cyberbullying when someone calls them out for their words and/or behaviors. They have dubbed those unwilling to tolerate their supremacist nonsense as the knitting cult underneath the poor disguise of “just wanting to keep it about the knitting.” They congregate at #dismantletheknittingcult and #makeknittinggreatagain, which brings us to “Green Socks.” 

A week ago, a knitter/dyer I follow, Bad Wolf Girl Studio liked a photo of green socks on Instagram. Like lots of Instagram users, myself and Jac included, she was just sleepily scrolling through, double tapping pretty pictures. No big deal usually. We all do it. But those green socks were by The Blue Mouse, and the caption on the pic was promoting a supremacist video she had made. I watched all six excruciating minutes, so you wouldn’t have to. It’s a choppy, awkwardly edited video of Blue Mouse trying to squeeze out a tear while she talks about how the cyberbullies are ruining lives — she specifically mentions Sockmatician and Tusken as victims — and how she can’t be a professional knitter anymore because the community is unsafe for able-bodied, white people, who don’t care how their actions impact others. 

Bad Wolf liking that picture is important because social media algorithms are more likely to show you posts that people you follow have liked. If someone you follow on Instagram likes a post and you look at that post, it will say “so-and-so liked this post.” Some of Bad Wolf’s followers brought to her attention that she had liked a post promoting a video with a textbook example of white fragility. Bad Wolf quickly unliked the green socks picture and apologized on her own feed for liking it. She explained that she didn’t agree with its content and that she hadn’t read the caption. No big deal. We’ve all liked a picture without reading the caption. That really should be the whole story.

I wish it were. 

#dismantletheknittingcult caught wind of it and felt horribly aggressed upon. I don’t know Bad Wolf on a personal level, but I haven’t seen her say anywhere that she was bullied into making that post. I looked too. I wanted to make sure I was reporting the facts here. She did exactly what I would have done. It’s impossible to know everyone, so sometimes you like some stuff and then find out the person who posted it is a garbage-person down the road. What matters is what you do after you know. Anyhow, the dismantlers are now holding her up as a martyr to their cause. They claim she was bullied into posting an apology and are using green socks as their new whites-only knitting flag. 

Call-outs are not bullying. I’ve been called out, and I was not being bullied. When all that Sockmatician #diversknitty shit hit the fan, one of the accounts I follow, Blackgirlknitmagic posted about it and used the term “caucasity” (caucasion + audacity). I responded with #caucasknitty, which I thought was pretty funny. Someone saw that out of context and called me out for racism. And you know what? When I saw that I’d been called out on a BiPoC person’s post, I didn’t feel angry or threatened. I was upset that I had made someone feel bad. I said I was sorry and explained the context. We exchanged a few friendly and supportive DMs. That’s the whole damn story. She thought I was being racist so she did the right thing and called me out. That’s only threatening if you think you might actually be racist. I wasn’t being attacked, and I didn’t feel attacked. So here’s the take-away: 

If someone calls out your content as racist or xenophobic and you feel attacked or threatened, you’re probably being a racist. Maybe, instead of immediately acting like a victim, you should take a step back and examine what’s being said. 

For those of you who read this far, I have an action item for you. Don’t like pictures of green socks for awhile without checking the hashtags. If you see #greensocksKAL or #dismantletheknittingcult, do not like it. In fact, block them. Without an audience, they will wither away. For the most part, people aren’t posting big racist rants under their green socks; this shit is subversive. If you like those pictures, you’ll give the hashtags more attention. Instagram’s algorithm will show it to more people and it’ll spread like loose glitter wielded by an overactive toddler. Let’s shut this shit down.

Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or cross stitching this square, you can download the Gone Rogue (D6) pattern here. Instructions and charts for both knit and crochet are listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, don’t forget to Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong! Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here.

~Megan-Anne

A knitting cult sounds kinda rad, but woolen acolyte robes seem impractical.

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