The Unbearable Whiteness of Blogging

The Daily Banter has rounded up the "7 Lame Excuses For Why White Men Dominate Your Favorite Liberal Sites":

The mainstream media, with the exception of MSNBC, maintains an abysmal record when it comes to diversity, while conservative media don’t even pretend to care. The American Prospect‘s Gabriel Arana took a look at diversity among liberal publications like The Nation,Slate, and Mother Jones, and came away with a raft of excuses from their editors, all of which are pure horseshit. Arana’s own over-complicated analysis eventually gets around to some productive points, but what’s truly revealing are the excuses he elicits from the editors of liberal outlets:

1. They don’t know how white they are...

This is indeed pure horseshit.  And Liberal sites where this is the rule should be ashamed of themselves and move to immediately repair this embarrassing gap between your principles and your hiring practices.

However...before I unfurl my Sigil of Liberal Righteousness any further, I must confess to the shameful fact that the staff of the driftglass blog is composed entirely white men over the age of 45.  And by "entirely", I mean entirely: all the research assistants, every one of the writers, the editors, the site moderators, our in-house fecalist, the content curators, those artists who put together all those nifty graphics, my food taster, tech support, the crew who handle the SEO, metatagging and social media end of the operation, the guy who brings me my lattes and even our interns...every one of them a white guy over 45.

Worse yet, I've rooked them all into long-term commitments wherein they get paid, uh,"irregularly" is probably the kindest way of putting it, and always vastly below the minimum wage.  In fact, all of them work other, less-than-minimum-wage part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Needless to say, none of them get health insurance. And sorry, dumbass, you're an  "associate" now, so no union bennies, no vacation leave, holidays or paid overtime for you!

Seriously, for a bunch of smart, older white guys, my staff are such chumps.

Over at The Professional Left, the diversity picture is slightly better, but I still make out like a fat rat.  See, while I do 1/2 of the on-air talking, Blue Gal does the other half and all the sound-editing, Facebooking and uploading, and handles most of our correspondence.  And yet I have scammed her into "pooling" any podcast funds we raise which means, in effect, that while I do 1/3 of the work, I enjoy at least half the benefit.

Plus we occasionally press some unpaid local child labor into service.

So I've got that going for me.

And now, Mr. Tom Waits...