Many people have asked me why I blog. Especially when, as I have stated often, blogging has not been particularly easy for me. I enjoy writing, but I’m not a tech head.

Witness my very first blog site--a mess of intense pea green and yellow—the only format offered by Blogger that looked “pretty”. I didn’t know how to change the color of the text—I didn’t know you *could* change the color of the text. I didn’t even know that if you clicked on the glaring highlighted names of commenters on your site you would be led to their blogging profile, which in turn led to their own blogging sites. I spent almost three weeks getting comments before I realized that most of those commenters had sites of their own. But despite my limited knowledge of the technical world of computers, once I began blogging, I was hooked. I may not have known what HTML code was, but something amazing was happening that I couldn’t walk away from.

Fabulosa and Nubian were the first women of color bloggers I met. And eventually, the three of us pooled our list of women of color bloggers and Mamita Mala, Angry Brown Butch, Kilimanjaro and several others joined the circle. Then all of us started talking, and asking questions. Why weren’t we getting the same attention as other (that is, white male or female) bloggers? Did we even want that kind of attention? Why were there only a handful of us? How could we incorporate our activist lives into the blogosphere? And why was it that a frightening number of fellow bloggers were finding our sites through very graphic and racist porn searches?

As we became more involved in our discussions and more people began joining the community, it soon became clear to many of us that in spite of what we had been told about the blogosphere being the last great democracy (where, because of “easy” access to blogging tools, everybody in the world potentially had “a voice”), the blogosphere was actually a site that mimicked on far too many levels the lives most of us women of color were living off-line.

For example, “top” political bloggers that claimed to speak with a liberal or progressive voice very rarely included a race analysis in their posts, much less an intersectional analysis of class, race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. Popular white feminist bloggers made up names like “breeder cunts” for women with children and limited their discussions about race to “where are all the women of color bloggers?” Community bloggers (those who blog together under a common theme) had no problem spewing out sexualized threats of violence against women of color bloggers—members of the Nigerian community threatened several lesbian Nigerian bloggers with “dick slappings” and outright rape. Straight female Nigerian bloggers encouraged this sexual aggression on the part of men against lesbian bloggers by encouraging the rhetoric and even suggesting which bloggers needed to be raped. A black British blogger had her kid threatened on a public forum by a group of neo-Nazi bloggers who had figured out where she lived and other personal information. Several women of color who put out commentary about the Duke rape case were called everything from “racists” to “nigger whores” and were told they should “take it in the mouth.” I personally have been threatened with rape, being fist fucked and have been called spic and bitch so many times I’ve lost track.

For many of us, these attacks were not just hurtful, but frightening and triggering. One woman of color blogger stated that, “It’s like being raped all over again.” But all of us continued to blog—more jaded and a lot angrier than before we became bloggers, but we blogged nonetheless. Why?

Only very rarely have women of color controlled the production of knowledge about ourselves—more often, production of knowledge about women of color has come at the violent hands of a structure that has a vested interest in our destruction or enslavement. Think of the Black Welfare Queen, or the Oppressed Burqa Wearing Arab Woman. Or the Anchor Baby Mama (the brown woman getting pregnant for the sole purpose of gaining citizenship through her child). Or the Submissive Geisha. Or the Ghetto Whore. Or the Giving Birth to Future Suicide Bombers Palestinian Mother.

Blogging may be a site of violence against women of color—but it is also a space where women of color have explicit control over how members of their communities, how other communities of color, how white people, understand and view us. It is a space where we (many times, for the very first time) have a space to dialogue with and read about the lives and organizing experiences of other women of color.

Slowly but surely, women of color are confronting the “democratic” space of the Internet for what it is—a violent hierarchical structure that reproduces harmful representations of and threats against women of color—and reshaping it to fit the needs of our communities and of ourselves. We are sharing our personal stories, creating alliances, confronting our “issues,” and demanding that the Internet deal with us on terms created and set forth by our own community. Grassroots base building at its finest.

Blogging may not save the world by itself, but it provides an opening to a larger movement—a movement that women of color can control, organize and run in their own way on their own terms. I continue to blog and fight for women of colors’ rights to blog and have access to blogging, just as fiercely as I fight for reproductive and social justice. The voices of women of color will not be silenced any longer.