by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Jason Sperber
Last week, the parentblogosphere (or at least the neighborhood I frequent) was buzzing, post-BlogHer, with HKMIC (that’s Head Kimchi Mama In Charge) CityMama/Stefania Pomponi Butler’s smackdown on clueless PR flacks trying to get mombloggers to flog their stuff for free to their highly coveted demographic. Seems that that demographic of tech-savvy, hip, acquisitive parents doesn’t include parents of color. As for the perception that PR folks don’t pitch mombloggers of color, one dude straight-up told Stefania, “You’re right. We don’t pitch to bloggers of color. We just don’t know what to do with them.”
Ummm, say what? Now, before I go too much further, let me say this. This is not about wanting to be marketed to, or to be offered swag or recognition. I mean, sure, free stuff can be nice, and knowing that folks read you is ego-boosting, but you all know I write (unfortunately) so infrequently that I’m not about to put a reviews blog on my to-do list too, and I am so technologically backwards that I couldn’t tell you any site stats to save my life. And yes, some more diverse and non-stereotypical representations of p.o.c. in media, whether fictional, non-fictional or marketing, would be nice, but that’s a “duh” proposition, and a blog topic in and of itself (as are the concomitant topics of teaching critical media literacy to our kids and combating the ill effects of rampant commercialism and capitalism on our families and communities. (Say that five times fast.) [Have I told you how much I love the Home Depot ad where the AsAm mom bribes her daughter to trick the clueless AsAm dad into wanting new a new kitchen? Or the Baskin Robbins (I think) commercial with the AsAm grandpa (or older dad? could be!) who changes the kid’s F grade to an A because the offscreen mom had promised some ice cream treat for an A, and then he busts past the kid to get to the car first? Heh. But seeing as how I can’t even remember for sure who was selling what in that one, I guess it didn’t really work on me. Oh well.]
No, this goes beyond clueless folks who don’t know how (or why) to sell to parents of color. This is about how blogging, specifically by parents about the enterprise of parenting, builds communities that both replicate and challenge boundaries of inclusion and exclusion found in “the real world.” Though a lot of talk stemming from the BlogHer incident revolves around the marketing piece, let’s bring it back to the real, deeper question that Mocha Momma posed at the beginning of the State of the Momosphere panel: “I pointedly asked if we could please discuss the lack of racial diversity in the blogrolls and communities we find ourselves in as a general topic but if we could explore issues of moms of color.” When the conversation got stuck on marketing and monetization, she tried to get it back on track, asking the marketing folks, “When will the diversity come into play?” Except for Stefania’s comments, the assembled mombloggers let the question and the topic die, ignored. And here, then, is the crux of the matter, straight from Mocha Momma:
Certainly, I am grateful to the dozens of people I spoke to after the session was over. There was a full 20 minutes of chatting with people who agreed with my comment and told me to press on and to keep fighting for women of color. I needed something else instead. I needed any of them to take the microphone and say, “Excuse me. Isn’t anyone going to answer Kelly’s question?”
Where were you, Mommybloggers? I needed you.
The concept of finding community through blogging, especially parentblogging, is an interesting and important one to me, because I started reading blogs and writing blogs because, like so many, I was looking for online community to combat offline isolation. I was a multiracial, Asian American, politically liberal, stay-at-home-dad living in a conservative, homogenous, segregated, traditional community where all those things made me “other.” Of course, I was used to being “other,” I’d practically made a career of it. But in looking for information about being a SAHD, or even looking for a recommendation for a non-ugly diaper bag, I stumbled onto the parentblogosphere. A handful of dadblogs served as my gateway to more blogs, as every new blog and blogroll and comment link introduced me to a world of SAHDs and SAHMs and WAHDs and WAHMs and work-outside-the-home parents of all types and stripes.
And then I started to notice something, something not surprising for the guy who used to start every class in college by tallying apparent race and gender demographics in his notebook margins to get a preemptive handle on potential participation/representation issues: I started gravitating to bloggers who turned out to be parents of color, or parents (through adoption or intermarriage) of kids of color, or multiracial parents, or Asian American parents, and not only that, I started looking for them. It wasn’t that race, culture or identity were necessarily major themes or even talked about at all on all of these blogs, but when it was there, I noticed.
With those that did explicitly talk about the intersection of race, culture, family and parenting, the connection was even deeper. Why? Well, I guess that’s part of what we’re talking about here, or talking around—the invisible line between those who understand that, and those who even have to ask the question, and the wish that, at least in these virtual communities we share with others due to the ties of parenthood, we could get rid of that line altogether, or at least assume that those on the other side of it realize it’s there and are doing their part to erase it.
When we launched Rice Daddies as a group blog by Asian American dads, started with the only other two self-identified AsAm dadbloggers I’d been able to find at the time, I wrote that what we had in common was that we were Asian Americans who happened to be dads, and dads who happened to be Asian American. While one or another part of who we were might come to the fore on the blog at any given time, they were all integral parts of who we were. So, while we expected it, it was still frustrating to deal with commenters who said things like, “I thought this was a blog about parenting, what’s with all this race stuff?” When Anti-Racist Parent launched, I wrote about how, contrary to popular belief, racism is a parenting issue. When it comes down to it, I notice when issues of race, racism, and diversity are raised in the parentblogosphere, or when parents of color are blogging (even when it has nothing to do with race) because it’s still an exception, because it’s noticeable.
Thinking about issues of blogger diversity after the Blogher session on inclusion and exclusion, Mocha Momma wrote:
That brings up another question as well: why aren’t the Top Bloggers people of color? Where is the Black/Hispanic/Asian/Indian Dooce? Is there a mommyblogger (I think I will just
pick onstick with that one genre for the moment to make a point) of color who is considered an “expert”? The reason I ask this has to do with a question someone posed to me in a private email (which, as you’ll realize, needs to be out in the open here so I’m repeating it).Are you a mommyblogger?
Well, that was rather pointed. I mean, it reads “Mocha MOMMA” on my address bar and my banner. To be fair I have children. They aren’t the focus of everything I write about so does that make me less of a mom?
No. Not at all.
What’s my point? That it matters that we’re here. Whether we’re talking explicitly about how race and difference affect our lives as parents and the lives of our loved ones or not, it matters. Does anyone besides me care that the woman behind Motherhood Uncensored, Cool Mom Picks, the Parent Bloggers Network, and The Mominatrix is a hapa mom? Maybe not, but it matters to me. Does anyone else notice that the mastermind behind ParentHacks is a South Asian American woman? Or that the dad behind Thingamababy is a partner in an interracial marriage and the father of a biracial child? Or not only notice but appreciate that there’s an Asian American on the crew at Dadcentric or that there’s not one but two black dads with The Blogfathers (not to mention an out gay dad)? Or a Latino dad writing for Neal Pollack’s parenting humor blogzine? Or Asian American moms blogging for Parenting or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer?
That’s not even to get into the sustenance and energy I get from blogs like Rice Daddies, Kimchi Mamas, Filipina Moms, Our Kind of Parenting, Anti-Racist Parent, and the blogs of all the contributors and regular commenters on these sites who are unafraid to say yes, this shit matters, for us, and for our children, and let’s talk about it.
On BlogRhet, a site that is “a discussion space that reflects on the practice of blogging itself, especially as it pertains to questions of community, citizenship, and identity,” blogger Tere writes of feeling a strange sense of exclusion as a Latina momblogger reading the mainstream of the momosphere:
The second reason for my prevailing sense of exclusion is by far a more important one to me…. And that is the fact that I am a minority; and that, more than anything, perpetuates this feeling – even in places where I have been included.
If you doubt it (or, do you even think about it?), let me confirm it for you: the mommy blogging community is white. And I am not. At least, not as a general cross-section of Americans define “white”. I am white in race but Hispanic in culture. And that makes me not white – at least to anyone who is not like me (I use the term “white” and “regular Americans” to mean white Anglos and basically, what has always been considered the majority in this country)….
[…]
And while blogging has opened my world in so many ways, it has also made me feel quite alienated at times. It has underscored just how different I am. And it’s frustrating. I mean, I read some things that are completely foreign to me. Like, I can’t wrap my head around it. And then I check the comments out, and everyone’s agreeing, and I’m just floored….
Obviously, this is not intentional exclusion. But it is a kind of exclusion nonetheless. It is my feeling that the MB world-at-large is predominantly made up of white women. Few are the African-American women, the Hispanic ones, the Asian ones, etc. Of course, this ties to questions of privilege; and the assumption is that white, in many ways, equals privilege. But there are plenty of African-American, Hispanic and Asian families that are educated, wealthy and just as privileged as white ones (to name the top minority groups in the U.S., but certainly this is can be true of all minority groups). I have made an effort to find blogs (specifically, MBs) by minorities. And they’re out there, but not as many as I wish there were, and certainly not in numbers that would drive the point home that we’re here and living and loving and have just as much to offer as anyone else. This dearth of minority-voice blogs is another topic unto itself, but for the purposes of inclusion or exclusion, I have to ask, where are the minorities as far as commenting in MBs? I mean, yeah, you don’t comment on a blog by first announcing your ethnicity, but there is a void of comments and conversation from women (and mothers) from the perspective of a minority voice.
Is this just me? Do any minorities who read MBs ever feel like, “WTF? I so can’t relate”? Does anyone else feel sometimes that the mommy blog world is a microcosm of the United States, where white voices lead and prevail and there seems little room for minorities? And where these white voices seemingly have little to no experiences beyond their white world?
[…]
The exclusion of the mom blog world of minorities is simply one based on ignorance. You cannot address, or include, that which you do not know. It is true of me in the reverse. But as the minority here, I can’t help but see it as a disadvantage….
That’s what we’re talking about here, at the root, not advertising dollars or even readership stats, but acknowledged presence in this community we’ve already called our own, acknowledgement of our diversity and our issues, of our part in all of this. So that there are no more “surprises” like the “White PTA” fiasco on Silicon Valley Moms, with some folks wondering why others were so upset. So that when someone, say, a newbie parentblogger of color, or even a PR flack, reads a piece on Babble’s Strollerderby decrying the treatment of bloggers of color, they don’t have a forced moment of cognitive dissonance when they glance over at the bios of the resident bloggers.
After watching the fallout from this year’s momblogger panel at the nation’s premier event for women bloggers, I can only hope that any parenting-focused events at next year’s planned Blogging While Brown conference feel more like home for folks like us.
Note from CVK: Jason will be on the BlogTalkRadio show Motherhood Uncensored this Wednesday to speak about this issue. Click on the button for more info.
Jason Sperber is a former stay-at-home-dad of a 2-year-old daughter (“The Pumpkin”) and the husband of a family physician (“la dra.”) living in California’s Central Valley. He is currently a writer/blogger/online community manager. A former high school social studies teacher, he has a background in ethnic studies and education for social justice. He writes the blog daddy in a strange landand coordinates Rice Daddies, the group blog by Asian American dads. He can be reached at daddyinastrangeland@mac.com.
Wow. This is the first post that actually made me REALLY regret not going to BlogHer. I’ve long held that there aren’t enough mommybloggers of colour out there (myself being one … kind of ). I’m so proud of MochaMomma for actually putting it out there so pointedly — and so disappointed that no one took her challenge to answer her questions as directly.
MochaMomma — sorry I wasn’t there. I’da had your back.
K.
I think the phrase that momboggers and marketers don’t know what to do with poc parent bloggers is the heart of the matter. The problem is that because poc bloggers tend to write , as stated here, more than just what color their kids’ poop is and we actually write about ::gasp:: race, it makes people uncomfortable.
The problem is magnified in the attachment parenting blogosphere which is overwhelmingly white and upper class. I know that many of these AP parents can’t fathom why I can’t afford a whole stash of baby wearing gear or why , as I wrote once, I could not breastfeed my first child (because I was a 20 year old single mom with zero maternity leave etc etc etc.
I want to write a whole article about racism in the AP world
NPR had a story I caught the other morning about how parenting is getting to be a status symbol — basically that super-mommying shows you’ve got lots of leisure and and financial means.
The blogosphere is also dominated by people with time and money–not too many people supporting themselves by blogging. And we know that having free time and extra money is inversely correlated to being a PoC, not to mention the reality of being a parent for most of us.
And then, face it, the Ad money and swag goes where the easy cash is flowing. If the PoC parent blogs want in they’re going to have to show they have readers and can move the product. This shouldn’t be all that hard, after all there is genuine community and the computers count the stats for you. But the PR agencies are not going to do this work when there’s so much low-hanging fruit elsewhere, in communities they are more comfortable in.
Now I’m really sorry I left the Momosphere session early for another one. Great post, thanks for writing it.
Latina mama in the house!
I couldn’t possibly add more than to what you wrote and what others have contributed, but I will say that the other issue is how the status of a blogger/writer seems to be inherently tied to either one’s political writings or to their luxury (yes, that is, sadly, a large factor) as a middle-class parent.
My question still stands: Who is the Black/Hispanic/Asian/Indian Dooce? Because once that’s established I think we’re on our way to getting our feet on the ground. Provided that’s it’s a leveled playing field.
While this post has set many things in my head to brewing, it is inescapable that even among POC bloggers and their devotees, the (lack of) diversity therein is mindboggling, and oft at odds (or read: can often feel like a clique unless you speak with jocularity, insouciance, snarkiness and a kind of virtual-swagger) with the sensibilities of many Parents-of-Color, as we are indeed a diverse group of people.
Yes, I understand how the ignorance of a language that touches upon issues relevant to both parenting and being a Parent of Color, can feed the sense and experience of being ignored, and at a disadvantage, when at “other” sites.
I would like to think that persons who “feel” in common, can develop a language and environment that is welcoming and nurturing to those (common) parties.
Don’t such persons tend to find each other?
Having just dropped my baby off at his first day of Kindergarten today, I just wonder at the inclination to try to “change the world” at every interaction. I spoke to the few women (White) I knew, a few I didn’t but who initiated conversation with me, and yet could not bring myself to even say hello to the only other Black mother there. Why? I asked myself, having never seen another Black mother on campus–ever.
My answer: Not going to make the same mistake as I have in the past and assume we have anything in common.
Gonna let the waters flow as they may.
Walls don’t get broken down like that, I know, and more power to Mocha Momma for her insistence on putting forth the issue of mommies-of-color-bloggers.
Much like Karen, neither would I have left her hanging. Really.
I’m not mother. I’m not even a woman, or blog. But I can see how this sort of attitude is creeping through people – not all, but as is apparent here, certain groups like those in PR.
To be told “We just don’t know what to do with them.” shows a huge amount of ignorance, in addition to the hurt caused by being grouped into “them”. We’re not even a race, nationality, religion anymore – and we’re certainly not American – we’re just “them”. I despair for the developed world
Kim relating to the last paragraph about the black mother – isn’t that some kind of self fulfilling prophecy? You ASSUME you don’t know have something similar based on their appearance alone, so as a result you won’t because you will never find out.
Though I would’ve thought it was bleeding obvious – talk about your child???
Howard…that which you
“would’ve thought …was bleeding obvious” is not. While you mean to suggest that she and I could have talked about “our” children, and not merely mine (someone in whom she would be expected to have no interest, or, unfortunately, an intense, unwarranted interest), it did not happen for the very reasons I spoke to: making no assumptions.
As to my assuming there to be nothing similar based on appearance alone: that is particularly the opposite of any foreground assumption on my part. And it is such past assumptions, by me, that have led me to the point where I now will NOT assume that I have something in common with a Black woman simply because she lives near me, we shop the same places, our children attend school together, we have the same height or hair color, etc.
Nothing prophetic to the moment. If the waters will part, the both of us being strangers, one to the other, they will. We will certainly find ourselves in each other’s company many times within the next school year, and have many opportunities to start with the simple “hello.”
more power to mocha momma!
i’ve never been to BlogHer and while i’m a chinese american writer-filmmaker-mama who’s been blogging since 2003, i’ve never sought out reknown on the blogosphere. (lack of time/energy?)
i have felt the need to check in with other parents o’color bloggers though, because there have been times when i’ve read dooce or mimi smartypants (transracial adoptee mama, little girl is from china) and had the reaction, “giiiirrrrrrl, that was about the whitest thing i’ve ever heard/read/seen!”
so if there’s a blogring, i’d love to join.
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This is such an excellent post. I’m a new blogger so I’ve missed out on much of the evolution and I’m coming into the blogging world now seeing communities of color growing. It’s still a mostly white world out there, but people are starting to take notice and some very strong, amazing bloggers are leading others through this maze of declaration. I consider myself a mom blogger, but many may not because of the same points you made here…”race isn’t a parenting issue”. I’m sorry, but race is one of the most important parenting issues out there…unless you don’t find equality a desirable outcome for our future. Apparently politics and feminism aren’t mom territory either, so I often wonder what people are teaching their children, if not these things. I suppose that’s why we’re in the mess we are.
Thanks so much for writing this post and for saying so well, what so many are thinking.
I was thinking about this also just the other day. As a Canadian Muslim mom I am almost never represented in any mainstream parenting magazines or blogs. I like http://www.americanmuslimmom.com but really we need so many more sources to include many voices in the parenting dialogue.
Suzanne, wood turtle is a Canadian Muslim mom and blogger. The start of her blog’s “about” entry is:
wood turtle is about sharing experiences in Islamic feminism, modern motherhood and just about anything else that’s on my mind or in the news.
I’m a believing Muslim, a woman and a feminist. This means that I believe in the tenants of Islam, I am concerned with issues affecting women in relation to my religion, world culture and in general and I believe that much of religion has been interpreted, written, commanded, used, abused, and seen through the male lens.
here’s the url: http://woodturtle.wordpress.com/
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