For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)

More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.

[read the rest of this post » ]

I’m here at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, and just some quick observations… while there’s way more women here that there was last year, the crowd is still overwhelmingly white. I mean… like, REALLY white. Nothin’ against white people or anything (many of my friends are white, HAHA)… it’s just that it’s sort of frustrating to hear people yak about the digital revolution when it’s essentially middle to upper class white people talking to each other.

On the upshot, I finally got to meet Jill from Feministe, who is one of my biggest online heroines. I got all flustered. (Warning, mutual blog-crushing happening.)