How My Friendly Neighborhood Listserv Became a Racial and Political Battleground

Something about the internet turns cheerful neighbors into the worst of online trolls

I’ve rarely witnessed a fistfight between neighbors.

Yet some days I feel like we fight constantly. Instead of using our fists, we battle with the words typed into that little email square we send off to the internet. Sticks and stones seem somehow quaint in comparison to the vitriol that seeps through my neighborhood listserv.

Some weeks, the listserve is a jumble of “for sale” notices, food truck schedules, and curb alerts (baby clothes, pots and pans, bedraggled racks of various sorts). Then something occurs that feels like a match struck to the driest tinder. Recently, an alert regarding proposed traffic changes morphed into a bicyclist versus motorist smackdown. Then one scribe inadvertently — as least I’m hoping it was inadvertent — mentioned the widow of a neighbor killed while biking. The mention was not loving or kind in any way.

I’ve never met the writer, and wouldn’t be able to pick them out from a DMV line. Suffice to say, I thought this post was unwise, though I kept this thought to myself and moved on with my day. But a number of people went much further. They thought the worst they possibly could about this person — then they pulled out their keyboards and said so, in rich, pointed, and swiftly escalating prose.

Perhaps the post was intentionally mean. But rather than a firm and personal email or a gentle and in-person expression of concern, a “reply all” invective flooded my inbox. I’d say the infestation was as horrible as the cabbage worms munching my winter collards, but the sad truth is that those soft, squishy bodies don’t bite or sting. The listserv is sometimes more poisonous than anything in nature.

Privately, I’ve threatened to some friends that I’m going to write a listserv opera. The curtain would open with gentle pleas regarding lost pets. A bit of static will enter with the announcement of political fundraisers. Then — explosions, cymbals, atonal shrieks — a screed appears about too many uncostumed Halloween trick-or-treaters or the best pesticides for June bugs.

Bazonkers (full opera diva projection).

Once, a gentle soul inquired about the opening hours of a Roses store, a discount chain common in North Carolina where I live. Clearly a bit lost and unacquainted with Google, the writer was barraged with criticism — heartless gazillionaires, the damned Republicans, how-could-you-even-think-of-going-there. Finally, one correspondent invited us all (think of it, hundreds of people and their kids!) to perform a loving act on a nether region when he returned from shopping.

The listserv is sometimes more poisonous than anything in nature.

To be fair, that correspondent later apologized. But I’m certainly not the first to wonder why we so often use language against each other online that we never would use in person.

One thing is crystal clear. The invective is decidedly not the fault of “the youth of today.” If they’re berating each other it’s on Snapchat and TikTok, not on fuddy-duddy technology like email. My utterly unscientific sense is that the worst offenders are on the far, far side of 40. They trend male and white. That’s not to say that women don’t partake. But for my opera, I’d cast more gray-haired baritones than middle-aged sopranos.

Once, I was rash enough to tease men who were fighting over God-knows-what. The height of traffic humps? When to remove tree bands? Rather than subject us all to their attacks on each other, I suggested they should grab their Super Soakers, go to a park, and see whose was biggest.

No, gentle reader. This did not help matters at all.

There’s a particular cussedness that comes with white men of a certain age; although full disclosure, my encroaching gray hair means that my edit function is also slipping as I increasingly say exactly what I mean, without the requisite shrugs, “kind-ofs,” and “so-sorry-buts.” The privilege and know-it-all-ness that comes with whiteness doesn’t help matters in my mostly white neighborhood.

I know that in real life, my neighbors are mostly good, kind, helpful, loving spouses, colleagues, and parents. So I always wonder what disappointment lies behind the listserv flame. Is a child struggling? Was a job or spouse lost? Was there some indignity in the doctor’s office or the Costco line? One local sage tries to check on the habitual flamers, who tend to be a little lonely and bored (and every so often off their meds).

It’s rarely the right move to lash out at another person, in person or on a screen. Sometimes, the listserv, like the internet itself, is the gelatinous stew of our society, where intolerance and racism bubble on in all their ickiness.

I’ve vowed to take the flamers in stride. My hero is Otis, a large Black man who lives down the street. A tenured professor and doting dad, he has been the focus of what I call BMW posts: Black man walking. BMW with lawn mower. BMW with weedwacker. Such posts are generally circulated as not-quite-calling the police, but be aware and be afraid and lock your doors. One sunny Saturday, Otis introduced himself on the listserv. He explained that he wanted to wash his windows, but didn’t have a ladder tall enough. Therefore, he was going to borrow one from a neighbor.

And that entailed the risk of a rash of BMW posts.

“So if you see a Black man walking with a ladder down the street in about an hour,” he wrote, “it’s probably me. Your neighbor. Otis. Stop by my house and say hello!”

So here’s to us all stepping ever so nimbly away from the keyboard in this political season to say hello.

Super Soakers optional.