she-pigments of imagination

During my twenties, i made the realization that a staggeringly high percentage of my favorite writers and musicians were white men. This troubled me. I knew that our thoughts are a product of what we pour into our brains, and that subconscious attitudes are passed on more readily than hand-me-downs in a family of eleven. I had to face the reality that my patterns of thought predominantly reflected white male ideologies and perspectives. If this seems an obvious realization, it's just that gender and race issues had been important to me even as a child. I kicked myself a little for not making more non-white and female reading/music choices in my youth. While this self-assessment had validity, i eased up on myself when i realized that all this was largely inevitable, because for millennia girls had been taught to be quiet and unintelligent, while boys were taught that boldness was their birthright. How could it be otherwise then, that history's achievers would be overwhelmingly male? As for skin color, this reality had limited parallels there as well.
But still in all, when one makes such a realization, consciously seeking out more female and non-white creativity is a most excellent and goodly response. Which i did.
Of course, a little piece of me was also kicking myself for partitioning the creative universe into color and gender at all. As a writer, it is often my fervent hope that people might take no notice of my skin or my sex (posting pictures of myself on this blog was a choice that took some pondering...eventually the desire to be naked outweighed the desire for albino androgyny). I am sometimes unhappy that my name alone invokes assumptions of ethnicity and gender. I've always loved tomboys and androgynous names. I did change my last name once, and a part of me thought about going even further, but that desire clashed with the part of me that finds name-changing contrived and past-denying.
No one ever said being an evolving human in a complex world would be simple.
More than a decade later, white males still occupy the lion's share of my musical/literary favorites, but not quite so thoroughly.
I now have Keb' Mo' and Buddy Guy in my life. I have Cassandra Wilson, Paula Cole, Joni, Annie Lennox, Alanis, and Tori.
Michael Harper and Sandy Boucher have joined King and Malcolm X. Judith Levine and Carol Tavris have joined Simone de Beauvoir.
The greater dream is that these and all people be defined not by pigment or genitals at all.
We're getting there.
I hug you all.