Follow Friday: The Blogiversary Edition Day Three

To  celebrate my second blogiversary I am featuring guest bloggers and writing a Follow Friday post every day this week leading up to my blogiversary on Saturday, August 15th.  I want to celebrate the WordPress community as much a I want to celebrate the fact that after two years I am still blogging.  To read more about my blogiversary go here.  Note I still need two guest bloggers so if you are interested in sharing your blogging wisdom and experience with my readers, please let me know.

---

I love my WordPress Reader.  I can type in any topic I’m interested in reading about and if someone in the WordPress community of bloggers has written a post about that topic it will appear in my reader.  For example, I just typed in my favorite dessert crème brûlée and voila there are posts to read like this, this and this.  I don’t know why I reserve crème brûlée for the rare special occasion at a restaurant and haven’t tried making it at home.

My point in all of this is that the WordPress Reader is a great place to explore and find other bloggers who write about topics that we ourselves write about or are interested in as a reader.  I try to write a fair amount of social commentary pieces and would like to devote more of my blog to social commentary in particular race and racism in the United States.  I follow the tags Racism and Race In America in my reader so that posts written by other bloggers on these topics will appear in my reader.  Periodically, I pull up these tags to see what others are writing and saying.  That is how I stumbled upon today’s featured blog The Girl Next Door is Black.

Excuse me while I say her blog name and smile; I smile every time I say Keisha’s blog title.  I alternate between picturing scenes from the movies “Beauty Shop”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and the remake “Guess Who”,  and hearing a stunned white woman’s voice screeching “OMG, the girl next door is black.”  Both make me smile and laugh a little inside because well I am sarcastic by nature.

I love that Keisha brings to the table a voice that white America does not very often hear (or care to listen to for that matter) – that of a black woman.  Keisha and I share very similar viewpoints on the issue of racism in America in spite of our differences: I’m East Coast, she’s West Coast; I’m a GenXer on the earlier end of the range and she’s a Gen Xer on the latter end of the range, which is a convoluted way of saying  I’m older than she is (neither of us are revealing our years though); and oh yeah I’m white and Keisha, The Girl Next Door is Black.

Some posts worth reading include:

Why I Don’t Eat Watermelon in Public

White Supremacy: I Don’t Know How Much More of It I Can Handle

I Am Sick of Having Conversations About Race with Brick Walls

Why “Black Twitter” is Important

I Don’t Really Care About Buying a House

I hope you enjoy Keisha’s brand of sarcasm, wit and truth telling as much as I do.  You can find  Keisha, The Girl Next Door is Black on WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and Bloglovin’.