This needed to be more than just a twitter comment to JSmooth of Ill Doctrine. Smooth's a good guy. He got me interested in video blogs. He got me interested in hip hop again. And he's just gotten noticed for a bit he did on racism and the word racist. And I'm happy for him. The video is three or so minutes of win.
Thing is though, the video also mentions principles I've heard coming from The Angry Black Woman blog, and Angry Black Bitch and I believe Brownfemipower. Basically my online reading circle is full of Women of Colour and I've heard these principles again and again and AGAIN.
From them.
Women of Colour
Obviously in conversations about race, things will be repeated over and over again by many people. It's Racism 101, spin, spun and pre-digested a lot of the times. But I can't help noticing that the women of colour I know online who've said the same thing, over and over again didn't get noticed. Their words aren't ending up on college ciriculums. In fact just this year there's been some serious sh*t started because of word appropriation and disrespect from the white femiblogsphere.
Now maybe part of this lack of notice is because they blog, they don't post videos. And three minutes out of someone's life vs the seven minutes it might take to read a blog and have to provide your own music is just a touch too difficult. Maybe it's because they have ANGRY in their names, or in their tone, or in their blog labels.
But the next time someone makes a quip about 'The Missing Black Woman Formation' without actually stopping to think about what it means to and for Women of Colour to be invisible - they should understand why they get cybersmacked.
All props to Jay. I'm serious here.
But it's just depressing.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Quick Note On Acknowledgement
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*nods*
ReplyDeleteThe internet, for all its searchability, has a weird compartmentalised quality: I can be reading a blog or a circle of blogs on a particular subject that are rocking my world, my thinking, and doing the same for a lot of other people. Yet I can then run across some other website, be it a media outlet or even another blog, and find that it's a separate conversation about the same thing. A lot of people having similar conversations may not be aware of each other.
It happens in fandom and fandom is what made me most aware of it. For years I did not know about female-centric, ficcing, journalling fandom, because I came to fandom through messageboards which were more news-focused, though they still had debate, and had a mostly male population. Both are good ways to roll but I don't get the feeling they know very much about each other, except sometimes when something nasty happens like with the Mary Jane thing or the "Hive Vagina" comments.
But that's mostly to do with different ways of approaching the canon, and different ways of discussing it. When we're talking about similar things said in similar ways by people of similar politics, like with this race thing, I do wish that people could get together more and that people who are blazing an important trail could be recognised. Because like you pointed out at the end, there is a sad, sad irony in the dialogue of blogging Women of Colour being marginalised in mainstream media consciousness.