Lately we've had several great discussions about gender diversity in political blogging, and especially, on the dearth of women on the major lefty political blogs. Most recently,
this post on MyDD, and
on dKos.
Whenever this subject comes up, someone invariably says something like this:
Why does this matter? On blogs, nobody knows your race, gender, or anything else about you, unless you tell them. We have achieved the ideal: we judge people based on their words, not their appearance. We are not racist or sexist.
I think that reaction misses the point. But I also think it's a natural, intuitive reaction for many people, especially people whose own perspectives and concerns are well represented. The claim I paraphrased above may be entirely true, yet still not mean that we need not worry about diversity. Why?
Indeed, someone did comment on the MyDD thread expressing
the point of view I paraphrased:
A black workmate once told me: "You are the most colorblind white man I have ever known".
And he was accurate- I'm <funny> that way.
I am also gender blind within reason. (I do not ignore interesting women in my proximity...)
But on the net, I simply ignore ethnicity and gender- or more accurately- I am too oblivious to note such info.
So I am surprised that in this day and age, when you can blog under any identity you chose, that in a medium where anyone can claim to be anything, there are still people stupid enough to care about ethnicity and gender.
[...]
I believe that only on the net has Martin Luther King achieved his dream where people are judged strictly on the content of their charactor- because the color of their skin (and gender) are impossile to verify- and therefore meaningless.
I make no assumptions regarding ethnicity and gender, and I know enough to ignore such unverifiable dinstinctions.
[...]
So IMHO, bloggers should adopt ethnicity and gender nuetral monikers, and simply be judged by the content of their charactor.
This was my response:
I think you're looking at a different side of this than the one that matters to those of us who care about it. You're focusing simply on the readers, and how much they know, or care, about the identities of the bloggers they read. From that perspective, you're right - the net has achieved King's ideal. I rarely know, or notice, whether the people I see posting on these political blogs are white or black or amerind or latino or male or female. As far as that goes, great. It means that when you're in, you're in. If you post a diary on kos and kos frontpages it, people will read you, often without an inkling of your gender or race.
That perspective entirely avoids the real issue we're thinking about.
The point isn't whether people will treat you fairly once they're already reading you, it's whether you'll post for them to read in the first place, and whether, when you do post, they'll see it.
The point isn't that we don't know whose perspectives we're reading, it's whose perspectives we actually do get to see.
Let's take a hypothetical. I'll deliberately choose one that nobody has presented any data about or talked about in this discussion so far. Let's say that most political bloggers are at least lower middle class economically, and that very few poor people living in urban areas participate in the political blogs we read. Of course, when you read someone's post, you don't know how much money they have, and you don't know how urban their place of residence is, unless they tell you. So if the above hypothetical is true, you won't know that you're reading very few urban poor.
However, that won't change the fact that you're not reading blogs by urban poor - not knowing that you're not doing so, doesn't mean you'll hear their perspective. It doesn't mean that the issues of high priority to them will get a lot of coverage. It simply means that you won't be aware of the problem, and be less likely to see it as a problem.
No matter how race-blind, gender-blind, class-blind, or otherwise identity-blind and group-blind a read you, and I, and everyone else may be, it will still be important for us to pursue diversity, for that reason.
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I want to add, also, that these two ways of looking at diversity, paralell a more general divergence between the way liberals and conservatives look at a whole lot of things: Is it solely about the individual, or do we care about the system as a whole?
If you look through the first lens...
- Diversity in blogs means thinking about whether individual blog participants are judging others based on their race, gender, or class. As long as they don't do that, all is well.
- Bankruptcy and credit problems mean we should look at each person who has those problems, and determine whether they did anything wrong, or what they could have done better. Once we determine what an individual needs to do to avoid financial trouble, and determine that it is possible to do, we have solved the problem.
- Abu Ghraib is all about the individual soldiers who tortured prisoners. They should have known better. They should be punished for their (personal) sins.
... and so on and on. It's an easy trap to fall into. One of the main things liberals contribute to society, I believe, is the perspective needed to understand that the "individualist" lens is only one aspect of these issues. That if you put good apples in a bad barrel, they may turn bad, whereas if you have a good barrel, even those apples which might have tended to be bad, will be good. That, sometimes, systemic problems can be important
even if every individual acts acceptably well.
Diversity is one of those. Even if not a single one of us had any racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise prejudiced attitudes or tendencies, diversity would still be something worth thinking about and pursuing. It will always be beneficial, and it will always take some effort.