What did I leave out?

Looking over the past few months of this blog before my professor takes a look was a good chance for me to be honest with myself about what I've focused on and why.

When I began this blog, I wanted to explore White privilege and the White community within anti-oppressive work. Why these topics? Well, this is was a fairly selfish endeavor. I have often felt isolated, both within and without the anti-oppressive movement: among people of color, I'm never sure what my role in the conversation should be - I don't want to speak too much, I don't want to ask to many questions and ask someone to act as my educator, I don't want to make a fool of myself; and among my White peers, I feel isolated because there aren't many White allies who are also examining these topics and themselves in any real way.  So this blog - what began as a project for a course focused on "ISMs" but will continue as my own means of exploration - started out to find some clarity for myself.

I wanted to take a good look at the anti-oppressive movement as a whole, which maybe was a bit ambitious. I focused on racism, but within that I feel that I fell into the trap of often looking at racism in dichotomous terms. So many of my issues are about racism between White and African or African-American communities. I've found that my blog posts have really mirrored the conversation in class, in that the main communities of focus are White, Black, and Latino, and the conversation has largely excluded Asian communities, Native and indigenous populations, bi-, multi-, and inter-racial groups, as well as the prejudice and bias that these populations hold towards each other. I have touched on many of these topics, but I do wish I had explored them further, and that will be my goal as I continue this blog.


One of my main hopes was to start a conversation, to have readers leave comments to get a dialogue going. While I see that a few hundred folks (or maybe the same few people over and over?!) have viewed my blog, no one has left me any comments! So get on that so we can get talkin'. Please :)


I'm excited that I have a forum to continue this conversation - hopefully not just with myself!