Women of Color Need To Be Recognized

Dear friends,

There is a crisis of Women of Color Being ignored who Need To Be Recognized. And there are not enough men speaking up about this crisis. Well, I am a male and I want everyone to know what I have to say. I have already spoken about this issue once in vivid detail on this blog, and I have spoken about the need for a boycott in even more vivid detail spoke about it on other feminist blogs in the comment section. Below is my full comment left for Renee at Womanist-Musings in regards to her wonderful post titled: 'Dear Black People WOC Feminists/Womanists Do Exist' found here:
http://www.womanist-musings.com/2009/02/dear-black-people-woc.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Renee, As always, a great post on your part. As you know I am a Black male feminist, and I help with the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog. We currently have two women of color RSS feeds (including yours) on the right side of our page that give people the titles to your latest articles and we also have women of color members in our Peace Communities who contribute articles. You mentioned "Instead of spending so much time railing against white women for their obvious racism, some time needs to be devoted to celebrating the large body of work produced by WOC." Yes, I agree. I think perhaps that you and several other Women of Color should start a website to give out annual awards to Women of Color, and if you want, you could include other Marginalized People. Your blog, and the blog of other women of color are certainly high profile enough that it could actually make a great difference. I've posted about this before in the comment section of feministing when I heard you and SharkFu speak about who determines what is relevant and I've posted about it on my blog. I have also posted on similar conversations elsewhere but I have heard no response from anyone. People say they don't like awards, but every year blog award websites gain a higher rate of traffic and notoriety and direct thousands of new readers to their websites who otherwise would have never looked their way. For example, The Weblog Awards has a niche category for best gossip, best diarist, best fashion...but not WOC? That's crazy and has racist and sexist implications as well regarding their lack of (or misguided) priorities. Their website said that on January 8th they had 95,000 visitors to their website since their awards began and 250,000 came on that one day alone. If you don't like the idea of creating a WOC annual blog awards I would like to encourage you to help spearhead a boycott for the year 2009 of all the major blog awards (name their names like the Webbies and the Weblog Awards ) until they create a separate niche category for Women of Color and Marginalized people. My belief is that they would agree very, very quickly but they just haven't had a unified group of people make the request for such equality in representation. It is my belief there are many bloggers who would place a badge or widget (that you create) on their website and blogs (including me) in solidarity with the need to boycott those blog awards and website awards until they create a separate niche category for WOC.

I think there are some folks who come to your site who might read this and like the idea. I would start it myself, but it is definitely an organizing effort that should be lead by women.

It is long past over due for WOC to gain recognition for their writing... which will open the door to other overlooked WOC crisis issues that we see multiplying during this period of economic crisis.

Keep up the great work.

Love for the people,

-T. Love