BlogHer - Mommybloggers of Color - Are they getting the support they need? - Comments

Great Post...Great Response

lhenry — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 23:21:56 -0500

I love this post, and as a mom of color I can appreciate your response LoveBabz. Somehow after years of getting the short end of the stick the general population seems to believe that Black Folks have more than enough, that one tv channel, one month for black history, one token black person and/or family per show (if any at all) is a fair representation of who we are and what we stand of as a race. It is for this reason that I started my site seven years ago - Multiple Shades of You Online because I wanted to show the multiple shades of black. I wanted to create a postive space to showcase the fact at that we have our own quality products and services that should be marketed to us on as high an end as all the other general merchandise out there. It is indeed a breath of fresh air to read this post because everyone else doesn't understand how invisible WE are. They don't know what it feels like to THINK you are a one woman show, with interests that other Black Woman can't relate to - or Rather being interested in bloggin and or other things and not having the media supply you with enough visuals to find familar places and faces to connect with. I've recently started and am currently working on the BLACK MOMS CLUB - www.blackmomsclub.com - which will be one of several sites I am developing specifically to fill the need for social networks for women of color because we do need them. I make it a point to saturate my senses with black books, movies, cultural events but you know people don't get that - doing so is HARD Work. We can't just turn on the tv and get 101 channels of us. We have to research, ask, demand, and in many cases create a space to express ourselves. I look around at my seven years of hard work and web developent and laugh through tears as I see all the two-minute bloggers and websites that have popped up, surpassed me and gotten way more recongnition because I - I've been promoting Black Sites since day one and that ... that is simply not commercial enough for the masses. So I am for the most part still invisible, constantly searching for places like this in which I can be seen.

-lhenry ( www.msoyonline.com: positive sites for people of color)

Women of Color Websites

Race, Class, Gender, Oh My!

Lovebabz — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:54:40 -0500

This is where the conversations veers off with someone not understanding what the problem is. And I guess it's because it is a hard thing to articulate...being invisible. No one sees you, sells to you, ask your opinion. No one deems you worthy of being catered to. No one sees a problem with not seeing you represented in any arena, except the criminal one. No one thinks of Black mothers except as mamies representing syrup. I know asian sisters feel it too, this invisible-ness. This isn't new, Ralph Ellison beautifully described it in his book "An Invisbile Life" Perhaps at the next conference there will be a whole bunch of forums dedicated not to diversity per se, but about how women of color can be welcomed into the circle and how any other woman/sister can help press to change the inequalities in marketing of news, materials, products etc. We all must be media literate and be in the struggle with each other regardless of race. I am not saying Gender trumps Race, I am saying that it can be the great equalizer...if we let it.

Love,
Babz

I'm still a little confused...

writergal8 — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:23:35 -0500

I can understand language problems for some ethnic groups, but I would think that people these days pretty cosmopolitan. I watch enough HK television and have enough HK relatives/friends to know that people in HK raise their children very much like (white) families in North America (at least in larger cities where there are more condo/apartment dwellers). I've seen ads for baby formula (for example) in Chinese magazines and they look no different from those in English ones, except for the Asian models, so really, I don't see how a white or black model in an ad won't "speak" to an Asian mom. If she's going to give her baby formula, she's going to buy it no matter what.

I hardly ever see Asian models in cosmetics ads, and I still buy cosmetics from companies which use models! How often do you see Asian fashion models? Yet, the high fashion market is HUGE in Hong Kong!

my blogs:

Writing Blog (for updates on my writing and media plugs about my book)

Shorty Stories (a blog for petite activism)

I was fortunate enough to room with Kelly

ninjapoodles — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:06:54 -0500

at the conference, and what shocked me as we discussed her experience in the "momosphere" panel (I was over at "More Than Words" at the time), more than anything else, was the seemingly flat refusal to even engage in a discussion on the topic. I kept asking her variations of, "What was up with that?" and she wasn't sure, just that it kept getting glossed over.

Is that surprising to anyone else, or is it more surprising that it surprised me? (If that made any sense.)

Belinda

No, it's not fair Writergal

lainad — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:30:31 -0500

To lump all women of colour into one group, but in this case - when talking about the lack of advertising opportunities in regards to these two particular bloggers, the argument here is that the marketers are purposely not approaching them because they are women of colour. I think the problem is, is that marketers couldn't care less about the differences you raise, they (like many other people) are just lumping people into catergories because the do not have the time nor care to look at the differences. And both blogs have a substantial traffic, which would warrant advertisers knocking on their door.

Not a mom yet, but...

writergal8 — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:40:49 -0500

Is it fair to put all minority mommies in one category? Different cultures have different experiences, and immigrant/children of immigrant mommies may face a different type of discrimination than minorities who have been here for generations. Also, there are plenty of minority parents who practice "American" parenting or a mix of American parenting and info they have learned from the "old culture/country" (this includes white immigrants), even generations later.

my blogs:

Writing Blog (for updates on my writing and media plugs about my book)

Shorty Stories (a blog for petite activism)

Mothers of Color Unite!

Lovebabz — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:19:50 -0500

Sister thank you! I am so pleased that a woman of color w/o kids took the time to see this as an important issue. As a mother of color, I have been searching for other mothers of color bloggers and I have come up with very little--so again thanks for turning me on to some sites that I was not aware of.

Love,
Babz
www.lovebabz.blogspot.com

Mommybloggers of Color - Are they getting the support they need?

lainad — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:05:47 -0500

I was wondering what the commotion was. There were people lined outside of the room, people clogging the entrance. I heard a lot of chatter and as one whose ears rise at any sign of a heated debate I slowed my roll and craned my neck to see / hear what was going on. I didn’t know what panel was on until I nudged my way into the doorway. As soon as I heard ‘Mommy,’ I hightailed it out of there. I had heard that last year’s Blogher was overpopulated with women who ran parenting blogs so I wasn’t too surprised at the huge turnout for The State of the MommyBloggers panel. As I am not a mommy (there needs to be an infertility track at Blogher next year!) I didn't know what portion of the conversation I overheard or it's relevance to the discussion.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Kelly (Mocha Momma) earlier on that day, and it was great putting a face to a name, so my interest peaked when I read her post on her site and on Blogher (that’s the great thing about these conferences…it compels you to revisit blogs you haven’t been to for awhile and turns you on to new ones). From reading the comments, I got the impression that besides the glaring issues of marketers ignoring mothers of color bloggers for advertising opportunities and the lack of racial diversity on blogrolls, there is also a problem of support from other mommybloggers. Yes, when talking about race and diversity, there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. But in this forum, a conference primarily for and attended by intelligent women who are initiating a social change on the ‘Net, if you can’t raise issues about inclusion here, where should you? It’s funny how women can talk about their glass dildos and their sex lives but with race, people suddenly get really shy.

What Kelly is doing with her site is extremely important, not only because she has created a blog that has become a popular resource within the mommybloggeratti (I made that up), but I think that it serves as a great resource of awareness to a population that might not be too inclined to read about cultural diversity and parenting. Before I started perusing her blog, I had assumed that all mommybloggers where white, middle-class women, so what Kelly and other women of color, such as Kimchi Mamas are doing is giving women who feel that they cannot really relate to the highly trafficked, "mainstream" sites a forum of their own. Again, it also is a mechanism for other women to be aware of the joys and challenges of raising children within cultural communities outside of their own But are they paying attention? Obviously the marketers aren’t.

I know I’ve used this reference before – maybe on my personal blog – but one of my favorite movies is Falling Down (Michael Douglas, Barbara Hershey, Robert Duvall). There is a scene where Vondie Curtis-Hall's character is standing outside of a bank where he was just turned down for a loan. He is holding a placard and he is yelling, ‘I am not economically viable!’ It is during the portion of the movie where Douglas’s character is roaming around the streets of LA and observing the hypocrisies of life, and while the scene is relatively short, it demonstrates how this character feels not only compelled to protest outside the bank, but also the anger and humilliation he feels in being denied a service that most people take for ganted. You have good credit? You should be able to get a mortgage.

My point is, is that based on classism, racism and dare I say it, white privilege and the thought process that accompanies it –the cultural norms that dictate that only the ‘dominant group’ are worth representing – that moms of color are virtually ignored by marketers, advertisers, and dare I suggest it (based on comments during a panel I attended the next day), by the large social networking blogs dedicated to mommybloggers. Cultural stereotypes come into play, as black women are perceived in media representations as a) having poor parenting skills, b) having too many children with too many fathers, and c) not being economically viable which means they cannot afford the products that marketers and advertisers want to hawk on their blogs. Stefania Pomponi Butler says that while she gets advertising offers for her blog, City Mama (most often for cleaning products?), her Kimchi Mamas blog haven’t received any. Could it be the name? Methinks so.

Funny how they can freely market cigarettes, liquor and fast food and expensive running shoes in poor, disenfranchised communities but hesitate in marketing essential children’s products.

But class does factor in to advertising, and from a purely capitalistic standpoint, it should. If I owned an ad agency or was a marketer, I would want to advertise where the money is. The problem is that they are using stereotypes to make their marketing decisions, assuming that all people of color who have children are in the lower economic scale, do not purchase – or want to purchase items for their children as much as middle to upper class white families do. What they are forgetting is that even though there definitely are people from every cultural background who will balk at buying trendy or impractical items for their kids, there are consumers of color who actually live above the poverty line! Plus, every child needs the same essential products, regardless of the race, gender or economical status of the mother. You can easily hawk those products to anyone, and anyone would purchase them.

Kudos to Kelly, Stefania and all the other women of color who are running parenting blogs and while I was not there, thank you for having the courage to demand for the inclusion that you rightfully deserve. It’s just too bad that you have to wait for support from other bloggers until after you speak up.