Last week a blogger named Steve Benko published an article discussing why he believes Odyssey is a site comprised entirely of "20 year old white college students" who are uncultured and "write about how much it sucks being white." (If you haven't read it, you can check it out here.)

Allow me to introduce myself to you, Mr. Benko. My name is Monica, and I've been a writer and social media director for Odyssey at Radford University for about a year now. I am not a "privileged white person." I'm a Puerto Rican Jew. My parents got divorced when I was 2 years old, and when my mom got remarried when I was 6, my now-ex-step dad physically and vocally abused us all and slowly took all of my mother's money, causing her to go into debt. We have lived in houses that are probably half the size of the one you grew up in. I've been working since I was 15 years old so that I could buy things I needed, since my mom didn't have the money to do so, and for the past four years, one of my brothers and I have been helping my mom out by doing things like paying for gas, groceries, bills, and other necessities that my family of five needs in order to survive.

Benko even tried to support his opinion by including a snippet from the about section of the main Odyssey website.

Not only am I not a "white privileged" writer for the Odyssey, but the majority of my co-writers at the Odyssey at RU (and at the Odyssey headquarters) are not "white privileged" either. We're a very diverse community with a wide range of races and genders. And you know what? We all put up content that's political, news worthy, entertaining, and personal.

But all Odyssey writers are white snobby college students, right?

I started writing and working for the Odyssey not because I wanted to talk about "guys who hurt me" or anything like that, but because I love to write. So much that I'm majoring in journalism, which requires me to get as much experience as possible with writing and editing articles in a variety of platforms to prepare myself for my future career.

To add to that, Odyssey isn't the only site where people and college students publish articles and share them with their communities. There's Her Campus, Total Sorority Move, Total Frat Move, BuzzFeed, and not to mention Wordpress... which you used to publish that article.

Sure, every now and then we'll post an "open letter" or talk about feminism or some actor or actress or something funny, but what's wrong with that? We all have the freedom of speech as stated in the United States' Bill of Rights and are allowed to write about anything that we feel passionate about or want to discuss. And you saying, "I know there are writers for the site who work very hard, and I’m sure some can write, but a few voices don’t speak for an entire site. One article from the site explains what it’s like to be rich in college, as if anyone really cares. This is not journalism, these are not writers, or authors, they are merely cogs in a machine -- a machine that I hope breaks, very soon," is just wrong. Before you make claims like this, you should really do some research. Go to theodysseyonline.com and look at the most popular articles for this week. Do you see any articles like the ones you're talking about on there? No? Weird...

Sites like these are amazing tools for college students to utilize and show off their writing skills, use as a stress reliever, and even possibly include in their college portfolios when applying for jobs. One article does not speak for the whole website. Odyssey has more than 700 communities across the country, with over 8,000 active writers. It's kind of hard to judge a whole database on just one article.

So, I encourage you, Mr. Benko, to try not to define an entire media platform based off of one article you stumbled across on your news feed. You're allowed to have this opinion, but please do some research before you post an article claiming that we're all stuck up rich college kids because the truth of the matter is we're not. I'm sure you've heard the saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover," so please don't judge sites like Odyssey from the first article you see.