Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

In the past few days I’ve read a few things, mostly related to Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press that, of course, brought back many memories of the primaries – and the massive, massive failure of most feminists and feminist and progressive sites in navigating that mess.

I don’t really blame them, sort of… well, yeah, I guess I do.  I am not sure what else they could have done. Still, I really hated all the “wounded white women (and their allies) only” threads which were put up on some white feminist sites to discuss charges of sexism, as I hated the separate (but equal!) “wounded people of color (and their allies)” threads put up on the same sites to discuss charges of racism.

I thought that was all wrong, wrong, wrong – we, as women of all colors and allies, as people supposedly headed in the same general direction we should have just talked everything out together. Listened to one another, even fought with one another, but not have everyone shoveled off into their own separate little corners. Of course, that was much easier for the blog owners and I do understand that… no one signs up to be a referee or a counselor or mediator. Still, in my view, it was a huge mistake. One result of that is the impression apparently still held by many white feminists that whereas all the sexism they perceived was documented by many white women, all the racism perceived was distributed, top down, from Obama and Black “leaders” and all sorts of other baloney.

This might account for Boehlert, according to Booman, virtually ignoring the Black and other poc blogosphere in his book.

Well, no. Nothing much accounts for that.

Kinda freaky how easily people who know, or should know better fell right back into the same racist tropes of Black folks needed to be “led”, needing to be “told”, following some race leader or something – instead of being autonomous individuals who, separately and together, saw some really bad stuff happening and came to their own conclusions.

So, anyway, after the nomination I was offline for a time so if there was any sort of real, multiblog retrospective done on all this, I missed it. I don’t think there was though, just from the reading I did once I did get back online. Maybe everyone is too wary and still shellshocked.

If we don’t have this, though, how will we know how to deal with the next thing that comes along? Without, again, defaulting to massive fail.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 11:58 pm and is filed under feminism, is there a lesson in this?, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.