blogging while black in the digital cafeteria
I want to thank everyone who responded to my diary, and to let you know that I think most of you got it. To the one or two who didn't, that's on you. I wrote the post because I saw a response somewhere else in Kos stating that they didn't see why Jena mattered. Here, I have to say that just after I registered at dkos, I decided right then and there to see if there were any black bloggers out there. I don't mind blogging while black in white, but I wanted some like minded voices, people who would understand me without translation. I found it. I found such a wealth of black voices out there, I was amazed, touched, and transformed. I had already started my own blog site, but not posted. After finding those voices it was on. Pain. It is a common voice amongst sisters who post. Because there are so many things out there to be pained about, such as Jena and Dunbar, a housing complex in Florida where a single mother and her son were brutally sexually assaulted by ten black youths, and the mother was forced to commit a sex act on her own son; in the end cleaning fluid was poured on the two of them, the mother burned and the son blinded. The young sister on who's blog I found this on is working tirelessly to bring changes to housing authority there, but it is a battle. Did you know there were some marches here in Washington against Debbie Lee, one of the execs at BET, calling for her to change the hateful portrayal of blacks on that station? Organized by black bloggers. In fact you may find that many things having to do with issues important to African Americans were organized by black bloggers who cared passionately enough to do something about it. Which is why I decided to write a diary. This was never my intent. I just thought I would read what others had to say and then maybe post a response. But I got caught by Jena and some thing else. Try to understand that most of us who blog while black do not feel welcome here at dkos or any of the other major blogs because they are so overwhelmingly white, with either few or no black voices. Many of us do not feel included or invited. Then too, there is this; much of the agenda on white blogs is almost purely political; much of what we blog is social concerns, and this is were we diverge. Racism in America still exists, and while some may not want to hear this anymore, for us it is a fact of our daily lives. It is underground, it is systemic, it is debilitating, and we have to deal with it, and so should you. So should dkos. Why? Because we vote. And we vote democratic, and we vote for whites. Many of us are not for Obama and it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with experience. He should have taken his time. I know this is a long diary, but I have one more thing to say. Many in the black bloggosphere feel as disenfranchised here as they do in the real world, just as marginalized as we have been for many years now. This is the digital divide cafeteria, you sit on one side and we sit on the other, and let me tell you something. Black bloggers are out there in the world agitating, and if those in the political sphere don't watch out, they may soon find themselves without the needed vote of blacks due to that divide and disenfranchisement. Last, if you should decide to seek out blogs of color you won't find any racism there, at least I haven't. We don't rant about whites, but we do talk about topical black issues, which is why Jena became a cause. We see it differently because we live it daily, racism, lack of education, jobs, poverty, an escalating crime rate, our young black men lost to death or jail, those are still our reality. We don't blog these things to make you feel bad, to be in your face, but to make you understand that though our worlds are vastly different in the way we feel them, they can still be shared and not marginalized.