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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,
