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• Tuesday, October 25, 2005 06:52 AM

  Sick of Salon's insular white upper/middle class American/western focus

  So this blog is supposed to be about "half of the world's population", right? Right. Why don't you just call this blog "for white, bourgeois, elite liberal American feminists?"

  Give me a freaking break.

  We'll never see anything on this blog (nor in the the rest of Salon) about the overwhelming majority of the world's women (unless of course it's yet another one of those condescending items about some horrible persecution about the downtrodden women in the third world who are of course uniformly silent and passive). Coverage of the world's women in Salon has always been totally superficial, patronizing and close to nonexistent.

  The young American liberals of Salon and the typical Salon reader (like most Americans both right and left) exist in an incredibly insular, elitist little world full of trivia and pettiness, thoroughly self-absorbed and ignorant about the complexities of the outside world. They reduce feminism to a totally depoliticized, simple-minded, consumerist "choice". In the slums of Brazil, the very active feminist movement describes running water and basic sewage as a feminist cause. But this is a viewpoint totally alien to the small minds who run Salon. Tell me, will we ever see items on vocal, active Muslim feminists, hmm?? What about gay Muslim groups like Al Fatiha? What about something on the race/class divide between feminists of color and white elite feminists of the NOW type?

  Today one of the great, courageous heroes of our time, Rosa Parks, died -- will we see something of substance on her, other than some glib repetitive little item indistinguishable from CNN's obit? What about the amazing, courageous activist work of Native American women, or the many African-American women in poor neighborhoods working for improvements in their lives and of their children? The vision of the women writing for this blog (and the rest of the Salon) is almost so totally white, middle class, American-centered (and a very small, elite part of the American landscape) with an occasional ear open to a story or two in Europe or Canada. Your incredible insularity confirms the outside world's view of American liberals as being just as culturally arrogant and ignorant as your rightwing counterparts. you are thoroughly irrelevant to most American women (poor or working class, women of color).

  —Isabel Read Isabel's other letters
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