the whiteness of the echo chamber

[sophiaserpentia]

A while ago brownfemipower commented on the fact that her post in December on the blogosphere controversy between (white) radical feminists and (white) transactivists received widespread attention and fostered a huge number of replies -- but when she sought to explore the racial dimensions of the debate she encountered an eerie silence. She realized that her comments on the topic had become merely another part of an ongoing white dialogue.

Now i see, via pandagon, that Garrison Keillor has apologized for his recent essay which drew considerable ire -- notably from Dan Savage.  I note, with a considerable uneasiness in my gut, that all of the controversy surrounds "two sentences" worth of homophobia and completely overlooks the racist overtones of half his essay.  (Read the comments for further clarification.)

These are examples of fundamentally the same issue: the blogosphere has become an echo chamber in which certain issues gain traction and grab attention, while other issues are shouted down.  And what i'm seeing here disturbs me: a fundamental unwillingness to explore more than one dimension of an issue at any time.  If race is not the primary aspect of an issue being discussed, IOW if it is not the "topic under discussion" from the very beginning, any attempts to raise it as a concern are ignored and shouted down.

Add this to my list of concerns about the viability of the blogosphere as genuine discourse.

Comments

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Salon seems like a pretty white place, and APHC certainly caters to a mostly-white audience. Do we know that any people of color paid enough attention to Keillor to be offended?

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know. I can't be the only person who noticed it though, surely?

[legolastn.livejournal.com]

On a quick search I can't find any blog entries primarily addressing the racism. Maybe some people actually got the funny, but I still think it's an interesting point. Most of the people screaming homophobia weren't too concerned with the other issues.

[akaiyume.livejournal.com]

And what i'm seeing here disturbs me: a fundamental unwillingness to explore more than one dimension of an issue at any time.

Is there any large-scale place of discussion where that doesn't happen?

I agree that is a very wrong way to have discussions. Problems, ideas, solutions - set in a one-dimensional space have very little application to reality and certainly don't work as planned when introduced into reality where all factors come into play.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, akaiyume. I don't believe that it's a problem with the blogosphere; it's a problem with people in general. They don't want to talk about racial matters because they think that talking about the problem will cause more problems to occur.

[kitkatlj.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. I guess I didn't mention things like, "What about the lives of average black kids who remember their families well in the fifties, Garrison?!" because I felt outdone by Savage's counterexamples & counterarguments.

I felt like Savage did his so well that it 100% led my mind to think of things like I wanted to bring up--such as fifties kids of other races in the same time period who took other family configurations & work roles for granted. It seemed that Dan writing counterexamples & counterarguments about one specific subset of people the [excellent] way he did would surely lead to more thoughts in more minds about potential counterexmples & counterarguments about other subsets of people than any poorly-written counterexamples & counterarguments about those other subsets of people, coming from me, could.