Ironically Ignoring Race In The Feminist Blogosphere

Womanist Musings‘s Renee Martin wrote an excellent piece about why she finds traditional feminism exclusionary. The only issue: she called out feminist blogs for being “largely run by white women,” including Feministing, Feministe, Pandagon and BitchPhD. The problem: they aren’t.

While some of the blogs were started by white feminists, most of them function as a collective, where those who have the time write when they can. Feministing, which remains an explicit collective, has a new executive editor, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, who has been there for five years. Of the four people on the masthead at Pandagon, two are people of color. Of the two people I know personally at BitchPhD, one is a woman of color. At least two of the bloggers at Feministe — Holly and Chally — identify in their bios as non-white.

Many of those feminists (including myself, a white woman) would likely identify with Martin’s critique of academic feminism and the mainstream feminist movement as being too focused on white women’s contributions and pushing them to the forefront of the movement without considering the contributions, needs and concerns of women of color. Of course, by ignoring — or remaining deliberately unfamiliar with — the contributions of people of color to the very blogs she identifies as being too white, she’s kind of doing the exact same thing.