Guest blogger: Francis Holland

AfroSpear blogger and organizer Francis Holland really lays it down today. He's talking about the way the democratic party looks down on black and latino bloggers: as "niche" bloggers. It's really unfair. We get all kinds of people coming to our sites: I get teachers. Nuns. Social workers. Government workers. Community organizers. Gays. Straights. All political persuasions. And I haven't been blogging a month yet. One more reason I've lost respect for the democrat party. Here's Holland's piece.
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May 27, 2008

DNC Acknowledges that Blogger Pools are Separate by Skin Color and Unequal

The Democratic National Committee acknowledges that it intentionally segregated Black and white bloggers into separate classes, with separate and unequal privileges under the rules for floor blogging at the Denver Convention. According to Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post, who spoke with Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the convention committee, Wyeth said:

criteria for selecting State Corps bloggers were readership, online ratings and focus on local and state politics. The General Pool will also be selected on the basis of readership and online ratings, she adds, with an emphasis on bloggers covering "national politics to niche issues of interest to specific communities." Washington Post

This makes it clear, because the DNC has consistently used this very language over the last few months, that whitosphere bloggers and the DNC consider Black and Latino bloggers to be "niche communities" whose writing is only of interest "to specific communities" but not to the Party in general. And that color-aroused ideation explains why white bloggers believe it is appropriate for them to arrogate and entire class of privileges to themselves while denying them to everyone else: because they consider Blacks to be a "niche" audience that is not "of interest" beyond "specific communities." That is, Blacks' issues are of interest only to Blacks themselves.

Clearly, the belief that Blacks and women and Latinos are a "niche" is not based on a numerical reality, since Blacks and Latinos and women together are 70% of the Democratic Party. The belief that Blacks and Latinos and women and gays, separate and in combination, are a "niche" is founded in the white male supremacy paradigm. This is the same paradigm that permitted white males to be a sociological and political majority under the South Africa Apartheid system even though they were outnumbered by Black South Africans by a factor of 5:1.

If you are not addressing white males' issues from a white male perspective, then you are a "niche", no matter how many there are of you demographically. Under the white male supremacy paradigm, white males are NEVER a niche no matter how few they relative to the overall population. Under the white male supremacy paradigm, in a country of ten million even one white man constitutes a "mainstream majority of one" while 9,999,999 women, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays and lesbians are nothing but "niche issues of interest to specific communities."

So, the DNC state blogging v. general blogging pools are not merely a declaration of where Blacks and Latinos can sit at the Democratic National Convention. They are the declaration and institutionalization of the subservient and client-state role that whitosphere pseudo-progressives believe Black people and Latinos should have in our Democratic Party, now and more so in the future.

This is why we must never concede that white bloggers have a right to usurp and arrogate for themselves rights that the rest of us will not enjoy. Every system of apartheid has a starting day, and the intended opening day of the new and institutionalized Democratic Party apartheid is the first day of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. When we think of Jim Crow and the exclusion of Blacks from the Democratic Party, Blacks, Latinos, women gays and lesbians say what the Jews say when they reflect on the Holocaust: "Never Again!"

Now, the white bloggers and the DNC insist that our strong language turns them off and makes them more resistant to our demands for justice, to our demands for an end to color-based apartheid. But we know that the unless we used strong and determined language, the media would not cover this issue at all, and then white bloggers would continue to ignore the issue as surely as YearlyWhitosphere will be virtually all-white again this year.

Whitosphere bloggers and the DNC insist that the near-total exclusion of Black and Latino blogs from the floor pool was accidental and not by design. And yet they also acknowledge, tellingly, that they have always conceived of the general pool as their intended ghetto for "niche issues of interest to specific [non-white male] communities." How did they know they would need a special ghetto, away from the floor, for "niche . . . communities" unless they were planning from the very beginning to exclude "niche . . . communities" from seating on the floor of the conference?

Now, Aaron Myers insists to us, incredibly, that the floor blogging and general pool blogging will be separate but equal. Where have we heard that lie before?

Because we have courageously stood up to whitosphere bloggers and the Democratic National Committee and denounced their color-based discrimination and apartheid ideology, the national press is covering this issue and pressuring the DNC to desegregate the floor blogging pool.

We must not concede that white bloggers will enjoy ANYTHING that Black and Latino bloggers will not. We will not use the "kitchen entrance," even if they insist that the very same food is served in the kitchen. We will not be relegated to the "Black Bathrooms" even if they promise us that the Black bathrooms are identical to the white ones. Because we've tried that and shed our blood when we discovered that it simply does not work: When whites divide the resources, separate is never equal.