Sometime yesterday or the day before I wrote a post called Cry me a river [1], a megarant that overtook me like a volcanic eruption and ended up after I read black Blackademic : I am this close [2], in particular, this bit :
we are being linked and and that is great, but why aren't we generating discussions? why aren't those same liberals posting on our blogs (piny, hugo, vegankid, fournier, barb excluded) it is not enough to take our words, post them on your blog, and hold all of the discussions on your own site. if thats not another example of white privilege, then i don't know what is. and i have also noticed that the only time our writings do get linked, is when they mention white people. if we type how fucked up now seriowhite people are, they link us right away. i am not ok with that--to me it seems to be a sign of white guilt, and feeling guilty doesn't create solidarity.
what is the common ground that we as "progressive" "anti-racist" bloggers are trying to reach here? to become an immortal human in the truth laid bear ecosystem, to get as many technorati links as possible? i am not quite sure anymore. but what i am sure about, is that maybe blogging isn't for me. i have a number of battles to fight in academia....my experiences there do not need to be replicated in the virtual blogosphere.
Of course, the negative vibe was such that since then, the site's database imploded.
I reacted to the post aggressively for a variety of reasons :
(1) The complaint is mostly about the lack of traffic and I have been quietly battling my traffic woes here as well but not just with other bloggers but with ... ahem ... Google. culturekitchen has the dubious honor to have outstripped BoingBoing in infamy [3] by being deemed basically a pornographic site by Google. I used to get a lot of readers from India and the Middle East. Now the numbers are nil. Not only that, Google dropped culturekitchen from GoogleNews [4]. Since these two incidents, this site's traffic has been cut in half.
(2) I've never thought of this site exploding in members but the slow growth (a lot of it having to do with the outtages, indeed) have left me a bit frustrated. If anybody knows how difficult it is to build a community, it's us here at culturekitchen. People opening blogs out of the DailyKosphere have it real, seriously easy and that includes the now delinked (from DailyKos) [5] Pandagon [6].
(3) My loss of traffic has cut my ad revenue and now I'm running the sites in the red. Which means that, under the influence of my hormonal uproar, I'm feeling like a dolt because I could have used a much smaller platform to run the blog.
(4) Hormonally speaking as well, this makes me also furious because, in the end, radical women of color don't really care for the opinion of this Puerto Rican black woman, radical or not. They're more interested in the validation of "white" sites like Bitch PhD [7], have been rubbing me the wrong way lately. No offense, no bone to pick. It's just my personal issues with academia or, more importantly, my issues with what I call academiaspeak.
Which is why, I challenge y'all to a duel!
Ok ... well ... not.
I want to challenge the idea of being marginal as a position that is outside of power. From there, I also want to go ahead and step into a discussion of what is supposed to sound and look like radical; particularly after this comment left by bitch|Lab via culturekitchen | Cry me a river [8]
The site doesn't have the look and feel of a blog that's political which was what folks were looking for. Now, I know from reading you, you want to redefine what political means in the first place.
But, you can see how someone would see the name and see the design and think -- not really radical, etc?
That's just an offhand thought.
I think that in particular this comment from BL is really important. Because from traffic now we're going to style.
Please keep in mind that I am a runaway (Latin American) literature scholar with a strong background in post-structural philosophy. Deconstruction, hereutics, cognitive poetics and mythopoesis ... I'm into the study of rhetoric much like how Whitney's into crack [9].
What I read sometimes in other people's words can be contrary to the writer's intentions, but that's how I learned to read in academese. Sometimes it's good, most times it gets me into trouble. I think though that's how interesting conversations happen.
So now, a break. More to come on marginality, power and blogging after I wake up from a good night's sleep.
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