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Is there anything in between rude/abusive when flagging a question?

SE being a multiracial and global company, it is important for me to have a certain consensus of action against statements that are presented as a prejudice or as covert micro-racism.

I refer to this question, and I only refer to the statement, because the rest is impossible for me to classify without speaking of clear racism.

Imagine the question in another way:

"How should we DEAL with people from China who don't want to speak Chinese?"

"How should we DEAL with people from France who don't want to speak French?"

"How should we DEAL with people from UK who don't want to speak English?"

I immediately flagged it after reading it, from all the options, rude / abusive seemed the correct one, since there is no micro-racism option or another alternative. The flag was rejected, the question is neither rude nor abusive. It's true; it's not rude, it's not abusive, and it's just a list of undercover micro-racist prejudices.

These types of situations only set precedents and should not only be seen and alerted at the time, but there should also be some action. At the moment the question remains intact without any changes.

Perhaps the question is interesting, but the statement is not.

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    You can use the "in need of moderator intervention" a.k.a custom mod flag and explain what the problem is. There's nothing immediately rude/abusive about that post, which is why a moderator declined the flag.
    – Justin
    Commented Aug 1, 2022 at 16:32

2 Answers 2

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For the record, I didn't decline your flag (nor did I downvote this question, it's a valid discussion to have) but I agree with my colleague. You're definitely right about the question not being specific to Spanish (I left a now-deleted comment there a few minutes after the question was posted) but it's a stretch to assume (even micro-)racism. One of my favorite adages is Hanlon's razor and IMHO a modified version applies here:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.

It's not unreasonable to assume the author hasn't travelled that much, or at least not to countries where they speak a bit of the local language. It's fine to leave a comment pointing out their misconception of this being specific to a single language, but 'has an air of prejudice' is already close to (not over, if it's meant to apply to the post) the unfriendly line.

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I declined the flag. I agree with what seems to be the consensus here that the question is not racist and does not qualify as "rude or abusive" to the point of being worthy of the standard penalty for rude or abusive posts. The question does not belong on Spanish.SE because the problem discussed is not limited to the Spanish language.

The language used in the question indicates that the OP does not seem to have good ideas on how to interact with people and express a wish. There seem to be enough questions on that on Interpersonal Skills, so the correct course of action in my opinion is to point the OP to those questions and close the question on Spanish.SE.

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