Bicoastal Bitchin Podcast

Check out the latest bigWOWO podcast where we interview the three bloggers from Bicoastalbitchin.com: Aznheartthrob, C-Bruhs, and Sherdizzle (Love their onscreen names!).  The podcast is 14.5 megabytes and runs for around 31 minutes.  You can download it here, or you can listen to it here:

This podcast was lots of fun.  I had written about BcB just a while ago, but I had no idea that the three had such deep activist backgrounds.  Exciting stuff.  As I’ve been around the blogosphere and have noticed a recent decline in the frequency and power of the Asian American activist blogs, it was reassuring to see that these three are going strong and are only beginning to build up their site.  This was one of my only podcasts where the interviewees openly describe themselves as activists.  For that reason alone I found the discussion highly empowering–these two gals and one guy raise money, get people talking, and change up the dialogue.  As mentioned in the discussion, they host events and do things on the ground.

So first let me express a non-serious thought, and then get into something a bit more progressive.

Here’s my non-serious thought:

Almost every great AA site I’ve seen started hitting it big when the most prolific blogger was unemployed (minoritymilitant, thefighting44s, BcB)?  Perhaps the best way to trigger an Asian American cultural renaissance is to downsize or fire young Asian Americans?

Here’s my progressive thought:

I’ve always known successful activism requires intelligence and knowledge.  The BcB crew clearly has both of these in abundance, but perhaps the one trait that separates the successful activist from the failing activist is that strong activists don’t ask for permission.  A weak activist gets paralysis by analysis and sits around thinking negative thoughts about what people think or how people are out to get him or her, while a strong activist does what an activist needs to do.  The mindsets are entirely different–a strong activist sees a world of possibility, while a non-activist or weak activist sees a world of danger.  You can tell a strong activist from a weak by the way they talk.  A strong activist thinks, “What can I do to achieve this result,” while a weak activist thinks, “What is the rest of the world doing wrong?”

I’ve seen this phenomena quite often both online and in real life.  A person will approach an activist website or organization and go about complaining about how things can get better, but they never actually get out and do anything.  They play a game of “this is what I would do, so can I do it?” and then they absolve themselves of responsibility by finding a leader on whom to place the blame for their own inability to act.  They constantly ask for permission to think for themselves, a privilege which no one else can grant them.

I totally felt the strong activism during this podcast.  The BcB crew is making it happen, and I hope all my readers will check them out and see what they’re doing on the ground.

Anyway, hope you all enjoy listening to our discussion.  If you have any thoughts on the talk, as always, feel free to post them here!