So we have Miss Laura & Thereisnospoon lecturing us on the lack of diversity in the so-called ‘progressive’ blogshpere.
And we have a Washington insider waxing poetic about how opposed to African American social justice movements we are with this lovely piece of tripe:
Markos may live in Oakland, but it's not 1968, and he's not hanging out with Fred Hampton and Huey P. Newton and there will be no slow motion or still life of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving for just the proper occasion. We're not a fringe group. We're the mainstream. And we’re not going to let some clowns make Daily Kos the progressives' counterpart to White Citizens Councils or Bob Jones University.
Is it any wonder that bloggers of color respond with pieces like this and this?
There are many reasons why the ‘great blogger revolution’ has come to shit. But one of the principle ones is that it has always, only represented white middle class values. And no, it’s not because people of color are ‘too poor’ to own a computer, or ‘too uneducated’ to write well, or ‘too radical’ in their social movements. It’s simply that leftists of all stripes are viewed as lunatics whose voices cannot be tolerated because they bring up those oh-so-icky facts about the exploitation necessary to make white middle class life possible.
They bring up issues of class, or race, of nationalism and imperialism, of the continued second class status of women worldwide, of our basic global inequalities ad nauseum. They cite real movements that have actually accomplished things, like the labor movement, the suffrage movement, the CPA, the civil rights movement [which largely included the Black Panthers], the feminist movement, the anti-war and anti-nuke movements... but are backhanded as ‘dirty hippies’, or more recently ‘uneducated colored folk’. They threaten middle class life... the life most bloggers in the ‘whitosphere’ seem to cherish so much. They talk about big ideas, like the problems endemic to capitalism, the structural inequalities governing the lives we take for granted. They talk about the racial inequality reiterated every day and the history of racial injustice for which we still must atone as a world culture. They champion local movements and real grassroots organizing. They ask too much of the netroots.
They simply ask for the privileged to recognize the morass of humanity upon which they tread in their solipsistic marathon to ‘a good living’ – and make an effort to rectify that injustice.
And meanwhile, the simple things, like impeaching members of government who have blatantly violated the Constitution, ending a war that was never declared by Congress, and reclaiming the media that is owned by the people are left adrift as a half-dead Coho Salmon, hooked at the side of a fishing boat making its way to port.
Do you want to know why you’ve failed?
We're not fish.