I recently had the incredible opportunity to moderate and speak at the 10th anniversary of the BlogHer Conference in San Jose, California. The three-day event brought together over 4,000 digitally influential women (and some men) to share their passion for blogging & online expression. It’s exciting for me to be a part of BlogHer every year because I share with the founders Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins the idea that that blogging should feed all parts of you — the whole woman!

I had the honor to moderate the closing keynote panel, “The Intersection of Race, Gender, Feminism and the Internet,” which 1,000+ women attended. I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to weave my passion for social change and technology into my career. As someone who has worked on human rights for years,  I frequently come across the intersection of race & gender online and offline.

My fellow panelists and I led an insightful & inspiring discussion, as you’ll see from comments in tweets:

With myself as moderator, these awesome women joined me on the keynote panel:

• Feminista Jones from BlogHer and FeministaJones.com

• Grace Hwang Lynch, BlogHer's own News & Politics editor, who also blogs about her mixed-race Asian family at Hapamama

• Kelly Wickham, Mocha Momma

• Kristen Howerton, Rage Against the Minivan

• Natalia Oberti Noguera, Founder and CEO, Pipeline Fellowship

• Patrice Lee, Director of Outreach, Generation Opportunity

Today’s social media space has led to an unprecedented crumbling of the barriers presented by geography and class in the physical world. We have amazing access to the experiences and opinions of others. At Fission, we specialize in helping our clients create well-informed and empowered communities who can lift their voices and support the causes most important to them.

I believe we can all better leverage the tremendous power of social media to serve our community — our friends and neighbors — and to quote RZA of Wu-Tang Clan: “inspire a better tomorrow for the world”.  BlogHer has long been a leader in helping women to find the power within them to create a space online that represents a better tomorrow for them and their families. I remain proud to be part of the BlogHer family! Thanks to awesome people in the audience photographing and posting to Twitter and Instagram, here we are on stage:

pic.twitter.com/WOmAPbGqkW

http://instagram.com/p/q72F3Bow-L/

And ... some of the specific topics we addressed were:
 

• Do we live in a post-racial or post-feminist society? If we ever achieve that, what would it look like? We also discussed the trending hashtag #womenagainstfeminism.

• Can you be privileged and and still be an effective voice supporting real talk on race and gender? We defined privilege as being white, affluent, educated or being an entrepreneur who can set her own schedule or be her own boss.

• Whether or not you dialogue around race and gender online is in part fueled by tensions among different generations — eg the hip hop generation was raised on MTV vs the millennials.

• How did you respond after being attacked by trolls online when you took a stand for a specific cause?

• Can your online persona and voice be a successful form of activism? Or is it just merely a form of self-expression?

• How do you approach addressing the impact of race and gender in your digital presence?

• How do we get more women to speak up in this digital age? With this, is it imperative to call out mainstream media and hold pop culture accountable?

Loved and appreciated this funny tweet form Anita at MomsRising:

Thanks everyone!

Cheryl Contee @ch3ryl is CEO of Fission Strategy and co-founder of Attentive.ly. Written with Elizabeth Bain, New Media Intern.