Over at Bloggasm, Simon Owens reports on the diversity — or lack thereof, depending on the subject — in the blogosphere.
Overall, he found that bloggers responding to his survey are twice as likely to be male and more than seven times as likely to be white. (The surprise for me is that there are so many more male bloggers. I’ve encountered far more female than male bloggers, on AOL and on Blogger.)
Owens took some flak about one of the questions in his survey, apparently. He asked about the race of the bloggers. Some answered the question. Others gave responses like, “the Human race.” Perhaps that’s a sign that racism is fading away; you can’t think that your race is keeping you back if you can’t recognize that you have one.
I can respect the fact that some people feel that since race shouldn’t be an issue, they shouldn’t need to answer such a question. On the other hand, in such situations, race is the point. If you’re looking to answer questions about diversity, you have to see how diverse people really are, after all. I don’t have a problem with a question about one’s race when the answers will be used to determine statistics on the whole.
He notes that a few people listed, “American” as their race. “American” isn’t a race. It’s an ethnicity, a cultural background, a “where you live” or “where you were born” label. But it’s not a race, because many different races live in America. Of course, the same could be said of the term, “African-American,” because there are people of diverse races in the many countries of Africa and its territories.
For example, I know of a once-popular television personality who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Many people would label him “African-American.” But the person I’m thinking of is the late John Daly, moderator of What’s My Line? in the fifties and sixties. 
If you’re talking about his origin or his background, he may be “African-American” by virtue of having been born in Africa and raised in America. But his race is caucasion.
A few years ago, there was a bruhaha over a contest when a school created the “Highest Achieving African American Student Award.” A young man named Trevor decided to make a statement and had two friends put up campaign posters nominating Trevor for the award. Trevor was born in Africa and moved to the United States in 1997, so that should certainly qualify him as “African-American,” right?
Wrong, at least according to the administration of the school. Trevor is white, and though he claims that his birthplace and continent of childhood makes him “as African as anyone else,” he and three others were suspended days because the school felt his posters were insensitive to black students.
If the name of the award had been “Highest Achieving Black Student,” he would have had no “point” to make. But that’s the problem with trying to transpose one’s race for one’s birthplace (or one’s ancestor’s birthplace): the real point of what is being expressed is lost in favor of something that is more “politically correct.”
There are some who would try to label me as “European American,” while having absolutely no idea where my ancestors might be traced. It doesn’t matter to them that a portion of my heritage is American Indian. Since I’m white, I have to be from “somewhere” in Europe, and exactly where seems to be of no importance, just as it’s apparently of no importance whether someone who is “African-American” has roots in Liberia, Ethiopia, Namibia or Mozambique.
My question is, why bother trying to turn race into a geographic reference, if we really don’t care about the geography? If you believe that someone of German descent is as white as someone of French descent, and that someone born in Botswana is as black as someone born in Cameroon, then why bother with over-generalizing the continent tag? What are you really communicating, other than a sweeping generalization, anyway?
And more importantly, if we all should be equal, why is there the feeling that the adjective “black” actually needs to be replaced with something “less offensive?” Why should the “black” be a negative?
If you’re not prejudiced, then saying that someone is “black” or “of color” should no more be viewed as hurling an insult than calling someone “white” should be viewed as giving a compliment. If you’re not a bigot, then what color one’s skin is should be no more important than what color one’s hair is. What does it really matter?
The relative anonymity of the blogosphere should encourage more diversity. We should be willing to take a look at how diverse the blogosphere is, and we should take the chance to read blogs by people who are different in some way: race, gender, religion, culture, orientation, or otherwise.
That should give us all the opportunity to see firsthand that the things that we think make us all so different don’t make us nearly as different as we imagine.
