Notes from a bitch…untitled…

This one’s for my sisters in the struggle online.
I was going to share some happy news with y’all today. My sister is a mentor and the young woman she has been mentoring for four years…through some good times and a lot of bad times…will graduate from high school this May.
Words cannot express how proud we are of her and how exciting it is to see how proud she is of herself…it is one of the most amazing emotional highs I have ever felt.
And I planned to share some of it here but I just read an email and I’ve decided to write about something else entirely…about who I am, why I blog and control.
Shall we?
I am an activist who blogs.
I spend most of my time offline (gasp) working in my community as part of the reproductive justice movement. I blog…on my personal blog AngryBlackBitch.com, here and several other places too…because I believe that part of nurturing the movement is sharing it, part of my work is to encourage others to join in and because I know that the forces gathered to deny justice online must be challenged online.
In the four years I’ve blogged, I have taken incoming from multiple fronts. Oh, there have been the predictable knavish racists trolls who fail to see how they prove my arguments through their comments. There have been the homophobes, the shit disturbers and the deniers of any and all oppression. I’ve been accused of not being black enough, too black or a white man pretending to be a black woman…of being too liberal, not liberal enough and a conservative fronting as a liberal…of being dangerous to feminism, an embarrassment to womanism and of being a man pretending to be a feminist woman …and so on and so forth.
I’ve watched some amazing bloggers go offline or take their blogs private and I’ve considered it. Oh, Gawd yes…I’ve thought about it a lot. But I always come back to why I went online in the first place and then I remember that there are as many people trying to control others offline as there are online. The anonymity of the online world adds a different angle to it, but it is still about control.
And I will not be controlled, silenced or shouted down. I’m part of this chorus and if it sometimes seems that I’m off-key…well, maybe I am.
Or mayhap the chorus is.
The thing is, I have also benefited greatly from constructive critique. I look back at my earlier posts and I can see an evolution of thought…a growth of understanding that has come from debate, discussion and disagreement.
But there is a difference between disagreeing with me and challenging my identity.
There is a difference between critique and seeking to shut my ass up because I’m not saying it the way you would, singing it the way you want to hear it sung or approaching a subject from the angle you want it to be approached from.
That’s where control comes in…and it has become increasingly difficult to see the difference between a denier of any and all oppression and a denier of my right to speak an opinion that may differ from yours. I circle back to a hunger some have to control the discussion…my voice…my appearance…my opinions…my bitchitude…my blackness…my womanhood…me.
And that takes me back to who I am…why I blog…and control.
I am an activist who blogs.
I am unbought…unbossed…and beyond the control of others.
And I believe that part of nurturing the movement is sharing it, part of my work is to encourage others to join in and because I know that the forces gathered to deny justice online must be challenged online.