Nez Crashes YearlyKos: The Series

I’ve been enjoying Nezua’s beautiful series about his adventure at YearlyKos. He was one of the Chicago 17 grantees to help bring diversity to the convention. A meritocracy is naturally diverse but this is where the netroots is at this point in time. Installments five and six were particularly interesting and moving. If you have time, read all six parts. Emphases mine.

From Part V: Pocho en la Ciudad:

Psst: Mainstream White Sites: The reason you are bleeding hits and losing readers is because you are right about something, and yet, you are very wrong about something else. You are right that people want change. You are wrong that you are leading the way on that change. You are right that people see through the bullshit of the Bush administration. But you are wrong that you have the antidote. You are right that the Republicans are poison. You are wrong in that the Democrats are currently the cure. You are right in that there is great harm being done by the ignorant and powerful to the righteous and the less powerful. You are wrong in imagining that you are aligned with the less powerful.

And some people are catching on. That’s all.

From Part VI: Laptop Revolutionary:

It was strange to see the news units descending on the bloggers. This really happened on the last days, and while I don’t have any stills now, I have it on tape, and will show it in the doc. It was absolutely incestuous to a degree that was comical…and horrific. Gangly black cameras angled over other cameras shooting bloggers blogging on media and about other bloggers while I am shooting all of them, and they are shooting me (Woman leans in after her cameraman catches a shot of my camera on his bigger camera: “Is that for a podcast or blogcast or something?”)

It really was something to think on. Thousands and thousands of watts, hundreds of lenses and microphones and billions of pixels firing off, massive currents of energy and focus in this building, so many bazillions of letters being typed, so many thoughts of changing the world colliding and interweaving at once. You’d think, being inside the convention, that the event was so important and historic that the whole city would be jumping up and down outside if you took a peek.

What was I to do at Hyatt McCormick Place? Was I to huddle in my little enclave of brown caucus/panels or my group of Diverse friends, and pretend that we were not a tiny, tiny group in a massive “white” ocean? Standing amongst all these blog owners and users, some who’ve you known online, you feel as if you are amongst a physical thread of comments. Threads from DailyKos, and FDL, and MyDD. So amongst all those “comments” that you feel originate from these groups, are you to forget the voices (that are not few in number) who rail out against so many things dear to your heart, tied to your very lineage and familia? Were we to forget that we were even there at all because we had been brought together by kind, well-meaning whites (for what we knew)? This wasn’t something I foresaw; these thoughts, these feelings. They were a reality that demanded to be factored in to the experience, though. And a large reality.

Was I to forget that some of that ocean around us–some of the voices on some of the stages, even, as I came to find–were hostile to the very idea of of that project that brought us together, and to the voices that say such a project was necessary? Was I to look at every $275 nametag and not think of the janitors and cab drivers around me, the counter people and those working for low wages as they cleaned up after Our Grand New Progressive Movement? Was I to pretend that the status quo–both online and in the world–was groovy?

Then it shouldn’t have been me sent there with a camera and my laptop.

When I was younger, I ran from myself–from my Mexicanness–because I saw I was a fringe, a freak, unwanted and uncherished and not reinforced by the majority. I put it together early, and it wasn’t tough to pick up. Perhaps it was even easier, as my adoptive father was an Irish Catholic from the South Bronx, a man so racist that the threat of being N*****ly hung over me all my young life, and if I edged too close by imitating Eddie Murphy skits or breakdancing or doing anything (which I did frequently) that–in some unspoken way–evoked blacks or black culture, the hate came down on me. That I was of Mexican descent probably ashamed my adoptive father, and I got his overall (but mostly anti-black) racism toward so many others by proxy. But either way, it became very clear, and in quite direct ways, that what I was made of was not favored by the crowd around me.

If you do not see your face, your name, your interests–your self–reflected in the crowd around you…can that crowd be said to be speaking for you, or otherwise interested in you and worthy of your allegiance and support? And even if they go out of their way to swing by your house to pick you up every time they have their Uptown party, is it good enough just to be included? Can you forget how you got there?

Or do you begin wondering what sounds might be playing at a party that you hosted? Or what a party might look like that you and your friends put together, where nobody has to remember to drive anyone else, and people just know to show up because they are talking about the same things in those places you naturally enjoy visiting….?

And if so, what to do with that wondering?”