I've written in the past about religion's harm to women, and the way modern sexism is aided and abetted by ancient religious prejudices that still survive today. Every major holy book has sexist verses, but some of the most misogynistic and the most virulent can be found in the books referred to by Christians as the Old Testament. Since this text is the foundation for religions that comprise over half the population of the world, it's small wonder that oppressive, sexist ideas still have so much power.

This ancient misogyny is on full display in this article about a group of pious Jewish women who want to pray at the Wailing Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. They're obviously seeking to perpetuate the faith, not rebel against it, and you might think that would earn them respect from their peers. But instead, they've faced insults, taunting, and even arrest, all from ultra-Orthodox men who demand that women be kept separate, silenced, and subordinate:

Men sporting the black coats and wheel-shaped fur hats that identify ultra-Orthodox Jews shouted at the women, calling them "Nazis," and telling them to "go to church".

...Their adversaries, including the rabbi of the wall, say that the women have no business wearing such religious garments as yarmulkes and prayer shawls, or carrying the Torah, the Jewish holy book.

Such things, the ultra-Orthodox Jews say, are reserved for men.

Whatever religious blindness has afflicted these men, I trust that we as atheists can agree that this kind of sexism is unacceptable. This kind of disgusting bigotry should be intolerable in an enlightened world. We, both men and women, have every reason to cooperate in stamping it out wherever it rears its head, and to work for its total eradication.

But one of the biggest mistakes we could make would be to assume that misogyny only manifests itself in obvious ways: as ultra-Orthodox men cursing and spitting at women on the streets, or Muslims committing honor killings against female relatives, or Roman Catholics arguing that abortion should be forbidden even to women with life-threatening ectopic pregnancies. Those are the most visible manifestations, but sexism can take on more subtle forms as well, more difficult to notice and therefore to oppose.

I bring this up because of an appalling editorial published on Comment is Free by Nancy Graham Holm, writing about the ax attack on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard by a Muslim fanatic. The title of her article was - no joke - "Prejudiced Danes provoke fanaticism", and its argument was that Danish writers and artists are to blame for any violence they suffer as a result of offending the religious sensibilities of Muslims, who demand the right to be exempt from criticism or satire.

This cowardly nonsense was capably dissected by Ophelia Benson, the author of Butterflies and Wheels (and also a columnist for Comment is Free). Holm's article also caught the attention of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and there, too, most of the commenters on the site's forum responded with appropriate criticism. But there were a few who couldn't stop there - including one whose reaction was to attack Holm as a "stupid bitch".

Ophelia stopped by to point out the inappropriateness of this, and she was met by several commenters who insisted that this was a perfectly acceptable way to criticize a woman, that it wasn't at all sexist, and even if it was, women are just as sexist as men so it's hypocritical to complain about it. Here are a few shining examples:

If you really want to cast a gender in the role of servants or slaves, then a case could be made that MEN have been the servants...

One half of humanity [that would be the male half —Ebonmuse] does not get a say in whether language is sexist?

Ophelia needs to recognize not only that "words change" in general, but that these particular words -- slang terms like bitch -- have changed and acquired a non-sexist sense.

These commenters argued that the word "bitch" is defensible as long as it's being used only against one specific person and not a slur against all women, and if it wasn't meant as sexist by the person who said it, then it wasn't sexist.

While I don't think this kind of attitude poses a threat to the atheist movement as a whole, I do think it's extremely important to ensure that everyone feels welcome among us, regardless of race or gender. That's a goal that the atheist movement still needs to devote more effort to accomplishing, and comments like these don't help. (Several commenters referred to the "locker-room atmosphere" of the comments at the largely unmoderated RD.net forums - although to his credit, Richard Dawkins himself did step in to put a stop to the flame war.)

To begin, let me pose a question to anyone who thinks that "bitch" is an appropriate term to use in reference to any woman. If you strongly disagreed with an essay written by a gay person, would you write a critique calling them a faggot? If it was a black person, would you express your disapproval by calling them a nigger? If these slurs are unacceptable, as they obviously are, then why is it any different to criticize a woman with an epithet that implicitly demeans all members of her gender? The word, after all, has historically been used to insult any tough, confident or assertive woman by implying that she doesn't "know her place".

To assume that any word can be used in a vacuum, stripped of all its past connotations, simply by willing it to be so is ludicrous. A word's meaning is not wholly determined by context - individual speakers can use words in new and unique ways - but neither is it wholly determined by individual intent - else we wouldn't ever be able to communicate with each other. Even if you use that word with no sexist intent whatsoever - a highly dubious proposition, considering the way we're all influenced by culture - it's hardly reasonable to expect the recipient of your message to understand your pure heart. They're much more likely to see that word as coming with all the sexist and misogynist context that has always been attached to it, understandably so. And condescendingly telling a person that they should just ignore all that and let you decide for them when they should be offended is only going to make things worse.

There are plenty of bad ideas out there that deserve criticism. But when we criticize them, we shouldn't do it in a way that cedes the moral high ground, or that insults or alienates people whose sympathies were already with us. Nor should we tolerate others who do these things. Even the gentlest declaration of atheism is going to anger many irrational people, which is unavoidable and is no reason for us not to speak out. But we shouldn't compound that offense unnecessarily if we want atheism as a movement to flourish and succeed.

Earlier this week, I posted a piece by Sikivu Hutchinson, "The White Stuff", about the legacy of racism in science and to what extent issues of race affect the atheist movement. Today, I want to write a response to that piece and venture some of my own thoughts on the subject.

To begin, I want to echo one of the more common objections raised in the comments: this piece was long on criticisms, short on suggested solutions. Granted, it's not the responsibility of every woman or member of a minority to educate white males on the explicit and implicit prejudices that still exist in our society (just as it's not the responsibility of every atheist to educate believers on the privileges afforded to religion). But if you're going to take the time to write about this at all, why not offer at least some suggestions as to what we can do about it?

However, that said, I still appreciate Hutchinson's bringing up this topic. Even if we don't know the solutions, this is something we should be talking about. As atheists, we should appreciate the value of consciousness-raising, of enlightening people to prejudices they may not even have realized they were holding. And as a political movement, we should recognize the value of including people of all types, including women and minorities - if for no other reason, then because it will make our criticisms more consistent and effective when we point out the examples of explicit racism that still exist in many religions - but more importantly, because I believe we have the most to offer to groups that have historically suffered the most from religious oppression.

For that reason, I strongly disagree with sentiments like this one from the comments:

I never thought I would see racial politics being brought into atheist discourse... It saddens me that, once again, skin colour and gender have taken center stage in an arena in which they do not belong.

I reject the suggestion that issues of race and gender "do not belong" in atheist discourse. Again, I agree with Hutchinson that not having to think about these issues is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for white males, whereas most women and minorities are confronted with them on a daily basis. That makes it all the more important that we do think about and discuss them, even those of us who don't have to.

Refusal to consider the possibility of unconscious bias is a sure way to perpetuate such bias, and to perpetuate the hostility that - like it or not - some women and people of color have felt from our movement and that's dissuaded them from joining us. Whether you think these criticisms are valid or not, the fact that they're being made clearly proves that some people feel snubbed. As good skeptics, we should make every effort to find out why that is, and to bend over backwards looking for anything we might have done wrong rather than dismiss the possibility out of hand. After all, we're asking religious people to reevaluate their entire worldview - the least we can do in the name of honesty is to subject our own to that same scrutiny.

I do want to take issue with a few of Hutchinson's specific points. For instance:

Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

I don't agree that atheists' race and gender demographics are as distorted relative to the general population as Hutchinson suggests here. Although it is true that our movement has a decided (though not overwhelming) imbalance of males, according to the 2008 ARIS results, our racial breakdown in terms of black, white and Hispanic is virtually identical to the general population. Granted, she might be calling attention to the lack of visible, well-known atheist spokespeople who are women or people of color; in that case I would be more inclined to agree, though again there are notable exceptions.

However, more importantly, I think the accusation leveled in this paragraph is false. I know of no prominent atheist who has suggested that white males "naturally" dominate science, or that we are better writers than members of other race and gender groups. (If any counterexamples are given, I'd be glad to join in condemning them.) I know that such sentiments have been expressed by certain people, but I'm not aware of any well-known atheists who've done so.

If there's anything that does concern me, it's the attitude I've observed in many atheists when this topic is brought up - the casual, automatic dismissiveness that claims this can't possibly be a problem, that only whiners and malcontents say otherwise, and therefore there's no need for us to engage in any self-examination or consider whether we're inadvertently perpetuating any prejudice. We should know better than to say this because, as atheists, we ourselves have been on the receiving end of that patronizing message so often.

It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history.

Again, I know no one who is expressing this sentiment. Most atheists do recognize that science has been used to serve awful ends, from Sarah Baartman to the Tuskegee experiments. Science is a tool for gaining knowledge about the world, and like any tool, it can be misused. But the actions of ignorant and hateful men do not impugn the tool itself. Nor do they prove that science is an intrinsically white, male, or "Western" enterprise, or that it does not produce objective truth about the world, and I unequivocally reject any suggestion to the contrary.

And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

I also do not agree that prominent white male atheists have neglected issues of race and gender. For instance, in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (chapter 7) to these issues in the context of how our society's moral attitudes have changed over the decades. He quotes prominent thinkers of the past, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Abraham Lincoln and H.G. Wells, to illustrate how even people who were progressive social reformers by the standards of their day held attitudes which we would describe as intolerable racism. Christopher Hitchens writes in God Is Not Great about Martin Luther King Jr. and the "filthy injustice" of racism. Daniel Dennett writes in Breaking the Spell about how racism is recognized as a great social evil and how this affects the legitimate scientific study of racial differences (for example, how people of different ethnicities may respond to certain drugs). One could argue that the New Atheists don't pay enough attention to these issues or don't treat them in sufficient depth, but to argue that they neglect them entirely is a charge that is simply not true.

Our movement is about atheism, not about racism or sexism, and there's nothing wrong with that. We don't have to give up our chosen cause altogether to address a different injustice. (Individuals, of course, can belong to more than one cause at once.) But, at the very least, these are issues we should be aware of - what they consist of, how they impact our movement (because they do), and how we can avoid obvious blunders. This is the right thing to do morally, will make the atheist movement more open and welcoming to people of all kinds, and will help us avoid repeating the mistakes that so many societies have made in the past.

A note from the editor:

There are some things in the following post that I agree with, and some that I don't. I intend to write a response to it myself, but I wanted to offer my readers the chance to have their say first. I've said in the past, in regard to those who wish the "new atheists" would sit down and be quiet, that I'd rather see too much criticism of religion than too little. I think exactly the same is true of our movement. Whether you agree with her criticisms or not, I see no harm in merely letting them be heard. If you disagree, then join the conversation and explain why. —Ebonmuse

Her name was Sarah Baartman, aka the Venus Hottentot, and she had ass to spare.

Like many Africans staged for public exhibition in 19th Century Europe before her, Baartman became an object of scientific investigation. She was poked, prodded, measured, assessed and ultimately dissected in death by British and French empiricist wizards like the esteemed scientist Georges Cuvier. She was marshaled as resident Other to determine the exact nature of her "difference" from "normal" (i.e., white) men and women. This standard only had weight and relevance in the context of Baartman's grotesqueness. Her deformations provided white femininity with its mooring as the standard of feminine beauty. Her sub-humanity gave her white male examiners a biological compass (and canvas) that was then translated into immutable racial difference. The sexual deviance signified by her enormous backside literally functioned as an epistemological frame and cover for her interpreters' own cultural biases and assumptions. Identified as the "missing link," Baartman's anatomy was critical to affirming white racial superiority and capturing inexplicable gaps in the ascent from "savage" to "civilized." Through the lens of the scientist, looking, seeing and interpreting were deemed to be "transparent" enterprises--not naturalized through the cultural position of the observer.

Tim Wise, the foremost white critic/interpreter of the phenomenon of white supremacy, once noted that whites "swim in white privilege." Like fish in water, whites don't grasp or see the complexity of white privilege because they breathe it and live it 24/7. It immunizes them in the predominantly white schools, neighborhoods, social networks, media, places of worship and scholarly traditions that they inhabit. It makes the systemic institutionalized nature of racial hierarchy invisible. And it marginalizes race and racism as part of the narrow, sectarian and, ostensibly, divisive concerns of a "minority" lens.

Navigating a fantasy "post-racial" universe, these "invisible" cornerstones of white supremacy are not supposed to matter. It is not supposed to matter that a five year-old African American male has less chance statistically of going to college or even of living to the age of 25 than his white male sandbox comrade. It is not supposed to matter that home equity for blacks and Latinos of all classes has historically been far lower than that of whites due to institutional segregation in so-called inner cities and working class suburbs. These "blemishes" in the fabric of American liberal democracy are not supposed to matter because individualism is the currency of Americana, and there is no evil intelligent designer separating one's exercise of free will from free enterprise.

Yet for W.E.B. DuBois, these disparities constitute the "wages of whiteness," a public and psychological wage of white social capital, translated into everyday white privilege. For those who bemoan the "provincial" and "race-obsessed" orientation of American writers of color, DuBois implicitly forces us to consider how the very arc of European American intellectual, social and economic "progress" has been shaped by the racialization of the Other. As an artifact of a supremely barbaric and unenlightened aspect of the Enlightenment, Baartman's dissected backside was a key player in the birth of the objectivist researcher. Representing reason and rationality, Baartman's interpreters were conferred with a personhood and subjectivity that afforded them "unraced" status.

Toni Morrison has defined unraced status as the ability to appear to be beyond racial classification or identification. Whiteness becomes the norm not only through racial segregation but through the discursive tools of defining value and worth. This status rests on having the right to write, analyze, classify, quantify and have one's conclusions recognized as universal truths, rather than as the culturally contextual products of a racist colonialist legacy.

When it comes to the "new atheism," the romance and Bambified innocence of not seeing is just a living. Recent debates in the blogosphere about the whiteness of atheist discourse get sidelined by accusations about the perceived "hysteria" of those making the claim. Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

So it stands to reason that white folk don't like it when it is inconveniently pointed out by ghetto interlopers that knowledge production and universal truth claims in the West have historically been marked as white. It's cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one, we say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It's paint-by-the-numbers entitlement time when the so-called new atheist "movement" is resistant to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader context of skeptical discourse. It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history. It belies humanist delusions of pure objectivism to say that "science as magic bullet" boilerplate will not enlarge the conversation to include those for whom organized religion has had some cultural and historical resonance (as an albeit complicated bulwark against white supremacy and racial terrorism). It is treasonous to argue that having the luxury and privilege to proclaim one's atheism, publish, become recognized as an unraced authority, disseminate tomes to and command a global audience and garner recognition for capsizing the sordid ship of theological tyranny is a peculiarly white enterprise precisely because of the history of Western knowledge production. And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

As Greta Christina has noted in her insightful critique of racism, sexism and visibility within the new atheist movement, hand-wringing about the absence of diversity without confronting the historical power dynamics of access and visibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When not seeing becomes a virtue, it's equivalent to telling all those uppity "missing links" to sit down and shut up. Let us write the record for you, because we know how it ends.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.

If you've got an ugly or uncomfortable historical record that you'd like to have whitewashed, then Christian fundamentalists are the ideologues for you. Here's their latest bit of doggerel: Christians deserve the credit for abolishing African slavery!

Slavery is one of the best examples — far from being a Western Christian invention, it was ubiquitous, and it was only the Christian west that abolished it.

Jonathan Sarfati, the author of this article, points out that slavery was ubiquitous in ancient cultures (true) and that it was usually not explicitly race-based (also true). However, where he starts diverging from reality is this section, which clearly implies that Christianity deserves all the credit for abolishing slavery and fighting against racism in the Western world:

However, America had a huge number of Christians who wrote and campaigned extensively against slavery... There was also the heavily Christian-based novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), widely recognized as a major cause of people in the North turning so strongly against slavery.

I'll gladly grant that Christians played a major role in the abolitionist movement (as did freethinkers, a point I'll come to shortly). However, there's a gigantic, inconvenient fact that Sarfati strives to ignore: Who were the people who instituted slavery in the Western world in the first place?

On this point, the answer should be obvious: The slave trade was created by Christians. Specifically, it was created by European imperialists - the colonial powers such as France, Spain, Great Britain and Portugal - whose explorers were colonizing the New World and needed a steady stream of labor to work their mines and their plantations. Papal bulls such as Nicholas V's Dum Diversas granted Catholic rulers the explicit right to enslave non-Christians; it's safe to assume that the Protestant nations came up with their own theological justifications for the practice. But Catholic or Protestant, all these nations at the time were theocracies, ruled by popes and kings who claimed divine right. It was Christians, not atheists, who began the slave trade!

This inconvenient fact makes Sarfati's arguments ring hollow. I'm not denying that William Wilberforce and other Christians played a role in the abolitionist movement - but if Christianity gets the credit for abolishing slavery, shouldn't it also get the blame for instituting it in the first place? It's no excuse to claim that slavery was "ubiquitous" in the past, as if saying "everybody else was doing it too" could excuse people of responsibility. At best, one could say that these cultures belatedly realized the evil of slavery only after they themselves had instituted it and caused it to flourish for hundreds of years, and finally corrected their own mistake.

Sarfati goes on:

[Rodney] Stark documented that even back in the 7th century, Christians publicly opposed slavery. The bishop and apologist Anselm (c. 1033–1109) forbade enslavement of Christians, and since just about everyone was considered a nominal Christian, this practically ended slavery.

But this begs the question: if slavery was "practically ended" in the 7th century, then how was it the case that, several centuries later, the Christian nations of the West were back at it and enslaving Africans and Native Americans by the millions? Try as he might, he can't sidestep the fact that the colonial powers were emphatically Christian and used Christianity in their moral justifications for slavery (such as the Hamitic hypothesis - an ugly bit of racist pseudohistory that Sarfati is right to reject, but there's no denying the fact that this was the accepted view throughout the Christian world for several centuries).

Descending deeper into the absurd, Sarfati claims that the Bible is anti-slavery. This claim I've already debunked at length, so I won't repeat that here - other than to point out that he dishonestly uses a verse which condemns "menstealers" to imply that the Bible was against slavery in general. As an examination of the context makes clear, this was only a condemnation of those who kidnapped and sold people into slavery in ways other than those that the law permitted. Slavery through approved methods is a pervasive and inescapable feature of the Bible in general, in both New and Old Testaments. Sarfati also ignores verses which state that Christian slaves are doing God's will by obeying their masters, and that for a slave to disobey or rebel is blasphemous to God (1 Timothy 6:1).

Sarfati closes with the utterly ludicrous claim that the "enemies of racial equality also saw its Christian underpinning". He states that the 1963 KKK bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham shows the "virulently anti-Christian attitudes held by fanatical racists". Yes, this is a claim that the Ku Klux Klan is anti-Christian - which is a willful and flagrant denial of reality. The KKK was and still is an explicitly Christian organization.

In the era of slavery, the true enemies of racial equality cited a Christian underpinning for their actions every bit as strongly as some abolitionists did. The best example is the fervently religious Confederate States of America, which repeatedly claimed that slavery was the will of God, which repeatedly cited the Bible, which put a Christian slogan on their official seal, and whose army chaplains boasted of the massive religious revivals that routinely occurred in the ranks:

Hundreds and thousands respond to their call and the woods resound for miles around with the unscientific but earnest music of the rough veterans of Lee's army... for conversions among the non-religious members of the army of Lee are of daily occurrence, and when they establish themselves upon the 'Mourners Bench', it is evident to all how deep and loud is their repentance. There is something very solemn in these immense choruses of earnest voices, and there are, I am sure, hundreds of these honest soldiers truly sincere in believing that they are offering their most acceptable service to God.

Let the record show that none of these revivals produced corresponding surges in abolitionist sentiment.

And it wasn't only Christians who led the fight against slavery. On the contrary, freethinkers played a role as well. In my post on the freethinker Abner Kneeland, I pointed out how his lecture hall was the only place in Boston that would give the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison a place to speak after the churches turned him away. As Garrison later said:

It was left for a society of avowed infidels to save the city from the shame of sealing all its doors against the slave's advocate.

Garrison himself was a freethinker who said, "The human mind is greater than any book... All reforms are anti-Bible" (source)

And Robert Ingersoll, the great agnostic orator, fought for the Union in the Civil War and was likewise an unflinching foe of slavery:

"We must be for freedom everywhere. Freedom is progress -- slavery is desolation, cruelty and want.

...I am astonished when I think how long it took to abolish the slave, how long it took to abolish slavery in this country. I am also astonished to think that a few years ago magnificent steamers went down the Mississippi freighted with your fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, and may be some of you, bound like criminals, separated from wives, from husbands, every human feeling laughed at and outraged, sold like beasts, carried away from homes to work for another, receiving for pay only the marks of the lash upon the naked bark. I am astonished at these things. I hate to think that all this was done under the Constitution of the United States, under the flag of my country, under the wings of the eagle." (source)

In that same address, Ingersoll said to a crowd of black listeners: "Today I am in favor of giving you every right that I claim for myself." Would that the Christian world as a whole had come to that realization far earlier than it finally did.

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In mainstream media, public conversation about the intersection between atheism and what I will loosely term third world feminism is as rare as Halley's Comet. In the corporate media universe, the groundbreaking work of feminists of African descent like bell hooks, Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins remains largely unknown, relegated to academe. Feminism, when invoked at all in mainstream media, is framed as the province of white women, a vestige of a less "enlightened" phase of American civil society.

The phenomenon of world renowned atheist feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, however, would seem to defy this pattern. In a recent Los Angeles Times interview entitled "Feminism's Freedom Fighter," the Somalian-born Ali proclaimed women's rights the human rights issue of the 21st century. An outspoken critic of Islam, Ali is a controversial and uncompromising figure with a compelling personal story of triumph over adversity. A victim of clitoral mutilation in her youth, she has dedicated her life to challenging institutional sexism and patriarchy in Muslim societies. Her activism against gender-based terrorism and repression of Muslim women has been influential in the West, generating international accolades as well as death threats from Muslim extremists. Rising to prominence in the post 9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria of the Bush era, Ali has elicited controversy for her perceived Muslim-bashing, garnering a plum position at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and morphing into a champion of Israel.

Much of Ali's feminist ideology is based on the contrast between the violent repression of women under Islam and the liberal humanist traditions that supposedly shape women's rights in the West. In her writings and public discourse she is fond of making sweeping pronouncements deriding the cultures of Muslim societies, valorizing the West in ways that downplay its cultural hierarchies. In a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine she waxed, "Western civilization is a celebration of life... everybody's life, even the life of your enemy." Of course, in many Muslim societies feminism is still a dangerously radical concept. For many Muslim feminists, the very notion of women's personal freedom is a space of epic struggle. Yet Ali's totalizing assessments set up a false dichotomy between the West and Muslim societies. By portraying feminism as a battle that the West has already won, she absolves bourgeois democracies like the United States of their schizoid relationship to women rights and human rights, a relationship in which rape and domestic violence are part of the national "democratic" currency. And by ignoring the historical context of the "third world within the first world," she ignores the very real socioeconomic differences that exist between American women of color and white women.

For Ali, white supremacy is no longer a credible threat or motivation for feminist struggle. In the Times interview she rightly criticized men of color for their perpetuation of sexist beliefs and practices, calling for heightened focus on the "internal" politics and tyrannies of misogyny in "third world" communities. Addressing the subject of President Obama's recent trip to Cairo she stated, "It would have been fantastic if...Obama had said, we have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man." Ali's apparent unwillingness to engage the connection between white supremacy, imperialism and sexism is a critical blind spot. Her failure to acknowledge the persistence of institutionalized segregation and its relationship to the disenfranchisement of women of color is problematic. These biases, and her paternalistic stance on Islam, explain why she has been such a darling of the European American conservative elite.

Certainly when one assesses women's socialization into and investment in organized religion there are many commonalities between Muslim and Christian systems of patriarchy. Granted Western women are not subject to some of the more overtly terroristic and repressive social prohibitions that Muslim women are. Clitoridectomies and honor killings are not part of Western cultural practices (nor, as many critics of Ali have pointed out, do they occur in all Muslim societies, and in fact derive from tribal not Islamic law). And granted men of color are responsible for the very intimate interpersonal violations of the lives and bodies of women of color. However, legacies of colonialism and racist beliefs about the sexuality of women of color continue to limit equitable access to health care and social welfare in the U.S. Women of color in Western societies are still subjugated by the dictates of Judeo Christian culture masquerading as secularized society. Puritanical prohibitions on women's sexuality and mobility inform institutionalized sexual and domestic violence against women. Rising rates of sexually transmitted disease and (in many highly religious white fundamentalist Christian and Latino Catholic communities) compulsory pregnancy due to failed abstinence-only sex education policies continue to imperil life conditions for women. Staggeringly high HIV/AIDS contraction rates, infant mortality rates and intimate partner homicide rates among African American women bespeak unequal access to health and social services in communities of color. Epidemic rates of sexual assault among Native American women reflect not only patriarchal control but the invisibility of Native communities vis-à-vis federal health public policy.

Thus Ali's contention that the West has "adjusted" its cultural and institutional structures to redress the hierarchies of Judeo Christian ideology is short sighted. Indeed, one need look no further than the wide cultural berth given to the Religious Right to see that it is one of the most powerful contemporary threats to civil rights and civil liberty in American history. The white Christian fundamentalist movement's assault upon human rights, women's rights and reproductive justice have the potential to reverse gains women have made in the U.S. over the past few decades. In the aftermath of decades of abortion clinic vandalism, bombings and murders of practitioners there is still no international outcry over the insurgent white Christian fundamentalist terrorist movement in the U.S.

From an atheist feminist of color perspective it is problematic to espouse reductive critiques of non-Western religions through the lens of a Western or American exceptionalism; particularly when these paradigms are based on the othering of people of color. The West has xenophobically demonized Muslim societies for their backwardness while "whitewashing" its own anti-democratic traditions and human rights transgressions. Ali's perspectives unfortunately reinforce this propaganda.

As an atheist woman of African descent Ali's life narrative and struggle for gender justice is a powerful example for women under the yoke of traditional Islam. Yet her analysis of the path to liberation has been severely clouded by superstar patronage from the very forces that would undermine the human rights mission of feminism.

I'm especially pleased to be able to showcase this new poet in this week's edition of Poetry Sunday. In the past, I've highlighted the lives and the accomplishments of famous African-American freethinkers like W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, showing that religious skepticism and freethought have always played a lively role in the American black community. Today's post offers another example of that.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Ohio in June 1872 to two ex-slaves from Kentucky. His parents separated when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother, who supported the family by working as a washerwoman. Despite their poverty, she taught him a love of reading and a desire for education, and he began composing his own poems by the age of six and was reciting poetry in public by the age of nine. Though he was the only African-American student in his class at the otherwise all-white Dayton Central High School, he excelled academically and even became class president. He also served briefly as editor of the Dayton Tattler, a newspaper published by his classmates Orville and Wilbur Wright.

After graduation, Dunbar launched his literary career with his first collection of poems, Oak and Ivy (1892). His second book, Majors and Minors (1895) was well-received critically and brought him national attention in newspapers and magazines such as Harper's Weekly and the Sunday Evening Post. His work attracted admirers such as the abolitionist hero and ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who called him "the most promising young colored man in America", as well as Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Dunbar wrote superb poetry both in standard English and in African-American dialect, though it was always a source of resentment on his part that the latter tended to be more sought-after by editors. Nevertheless, he was a prolific author throughout his life, turning out poetry, novels, short story collections, lyrics for musicals, and even a play - In Dahomey, the first Broadway musical written and performed entirely by African-Americans - right up until his untimely death in 1906, at the age of 33, from tuberculosis. Some of his work had a strong flavor of freethought, as we can see in today's poem.

Religion

I am no priest of crooks nor creeds,
For human wants and human needs
Are more to me than prophets' deeds;
And human tears and human cares
Affect me more than human prayers.

Go, cease your wail, lugubrious saint!
You fret high Heaven with your plaint.
Is this the "Christian's joy" you paint?
Is this the Christian's boasted bliss?
Avails your faith no more than this?

Take up your arms, come out with me,
Let Heav'n alone; humanity
Needs more and Heaven less from thee.
With pity for mankind look 'round;
Help them to rise — and Heaven is found.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

By Sikivu Hutchinson

For the longest time religion has simply been an accepted way of life for you, unchallenged, unquestioned, a shopworn ritual, gentle as a vise. If you're churchgoing the first seeds of doubt may be planted after squirming through umpteen marathon prayer sessions. If you're not churchgoing, doubt may come from seeing all the privilege and status, the houses, cars and ring-kissing reverence lavished on the pastors, the bishops, the priests and other hallowed Christian elite.

At first, doubt feels as though you're teetering, walking a tightrope over quicksand, staring down into a jury of horrified faces - of family, of friends, of anyone who has ever claimed the right to sit in judgment of you. In doubt, you look around you, and wonder about the incredible amount of real estate churches suck up, the dutiful who power the meager storefronts dotting every block, the elderly sisters resplendent in white ushers' uniforms scrounging their last Social Security check for the collection plate. As a questioning teenager these were indelible images for me, signposts driving through communities decades removed from the 1965 Watts uprising yet still steeped in its turbulence. As a black girl from a politically conscious, secular family this was the everyday currency of black community, "natural" and impenetrable, anchored by the belief that regardless of circumstance, regardless of the crushing blight of racial injustice, there was always the comforting bludgeon of blind faith.

In doubt, the prevalence of suffering and injustice are held up as "evidence" of God's presence, the lifelong exam of hard knocks that you're slapped down to take. Indeed, you are told, suffering and injustice validate the need to persevere, to lap up more scripture and take every hardship on the chin in submission to divine providence.

Yet you wonder how God could justify the near ritualistic killings of unarmed people of color by the police in your community, could sanction the lopsided numbers of black youth in prison versus those who go on to college, could turn a blind eye to the bulging ranks of your peers who are homeless, in foster care or simply on the brink. If you are middle class, in a comfortable home with no worries about where your next meal is going to come from, living the insular life of an average teenage sinner, you may be told that you are "blessed," that it is part of God's plan, and that you should not consider your good fortune in the context of others' misfortune but concede to the mystery of God's ways.

And yet if you've been shattered, like so many of my students have, by the murders of friends who could read your mind, who could make you pee laughing one minute and drive you crazy with fist-clenching rage the next, who were your life raft body, soul and blood; then the bromide of unquestioning faith is brutally, viciously inadequate. Is, in fact, a mockery of justice, an absurd consolation as you walk through the shadows in the valley of death, tiptoeing past grave after grave of the departed, the bright-eyed sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old black and brown faces cut down by boys that look like them the day before graduation, the night after prom, the morning of the first day of college. Will the Lord be your shepherd as it was theirs?

And if you are a young woman at this philosophical crossroads there is the question of whether there is safe space in a culture that defines your worth through conformity, submission and policed sexuality. Of whether your sisters will become the La Buena Mujer figure that your mother and her mother were trained to become, a figure based on the model of self-sacrificing saints and virgins, of protecting sinning menfolk, of being seen and not heard, of having every inch of one's body mapped out and territorialized like the West Bank in Palestine.

If you have been questioning these violent contradictions you might be asked — what other models of morality are there? You may inwardly reply, "morality" as commandeered by preachers lambasting the gutter religions of competing cults, damning gays on Sunday and screwing everything that moves on Monday? Or "morality" as defined by predators in prayer robes insulated for generations from the full scrutiny of the law? Or "morality" as dictated by fundamentalist terrorists who sanction the murders of abortion doctors in defense of the "rights" of the unborn while millions of living, breathing children go without health care in the wealthiest nation on earth?

If you have been grappling with these questions and see no concrete alternatives, you may retreat from or go underground with your beliefs. But know that you are not alone in your doubts or passion for truth. There are others in your community who think as you do, who may have already been marginalized and dismissed for their views. They can show you that being a moral person, having inner strength and defining one's path in life is not dependent upon bowing down to Gods, worshipping on Sundays, knowing scripture backwards and forwards and following the prayerful herd. As African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston said, "I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I have been given a mind and willpower for that very purpose." It is my belief that being a moral person and building a moral community is based on a justice compass, and it is what communities of color have bequeathed to this bloody experiment in "democracy" ever since the first European illegal "alien" occupied these native lands.

The researchers behind the ARIS, which is the gold standard for American religious demographics, have released a new study that builds on their 2008 results with an in-depth look at one group that's near and dear to our hearts: "American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population". (HT: Friendly Atheist)

As always, there's plenty of interesting data here to contemplate. Although "nones" show a decided gender imbalance - 60% of them are male, while the general population is 51% female - their racial breakdown in terms of black, white and Hispanic is virtually identical to that of the wider population. This data is a useful calibration to my recent post on atheism, race and gender. I admit I was surprised by this result. It's contrary to my own experience, which is that female atheists are numerous, but atheists who are people of color are not nearly as common.

A particularly welcome point in this study is the fact that members of younger generations are more likely to be nones. This demographic trend leads the ARIS researchers to forecast that they could account for 25% of the American population within 20 years. This spells bad news for the religious right and the Republican party, since nones, for obvious reasons, are also much more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (although even more of them are independents).

However, the ARIS researchers strongly emphasize that not all nones are atheists. About half are deists (which the authors define as people who believe in a higher power, but not a personal god) or theists (believe in a personal god, though not members of any organized religion). The authors classify the rest of the nones as either agnostic or atheist, and argue that atheists make up only a "small minority" of this group. It's not clear how they reconcile all this with their earlier findings that about 12% of Americans are atheists and another 12% are deists, based on their stated beliefs. Wouldn't that put us nearly at the 25% mark already?

P.Z. Myers argues that these results tell us only that "the long-running campaign in American culture to stigmatize atheism has been highly successful", and that many people who are functional atheists are nevertheless afraid to claim that term to describe themselves. I think there's a fair amount of truth to that. The ARIS itself provides evidence for this: as previously mentioned, one thing it found is that the number of people who call themselves atheists is relatively small, but the number of people who are atheists, based on their stated beliefs, is much higher.

That said, the number of self-identified atheists is growing, more rapidly than the growth of the nones in general, which in turn is faster than the growth of any other religious group in the U.S. As I've said before, this is all the more reason for atheists to speak out, forcefully and passionately, and continue our campaign to publicly advocate atheism. We need to make "atheist" a label that people are comfortable, or better yet, proud to claim for themselves!

Even if a substantial fraction of nones hold some form of belief in God, that doesn't mean atheism is losing ground. Rather, the conversions are coming from the other direction (also a point supported by the study) - religious people are falling away and becoming nones. They may not entirely discard the beliefs they held before, but they've dropped their formal allegiance to a church.

The lesson to draw from this, I think, is that the pull of orthodoxy is weakening in America. It used to be that a relatively small number of churches had control of the religious landscape, and they exerted enormous pressure on everyone to define themselves in terms of one denomination or another. But their role as cultural arbiters is fading, and people are becoming more comfortable seeking their own religious identities, defining themselves in their own terms rather than through strict adherence to ancient creeds. The rise of the atheist movement is one part of this diversification, and by spreading the message that people aren't required to be theist, we can accelerate the trend and ensure the continued weakening of religious orthodoxy.

Inspired by the always-inspiring Greta Christina and her two recent posts on the subject, I want to offer some thoughts on a topic I've rarely discussed on this blog: the intersection of atheism with issues of race and gender.

I haven't discussed this subject much because I don't feel I have any real qualifications to do so. As a white male, I haven't often had to confront issues of racism or sexism, and I'm reluctant to speak about things which I don't have much experience with. But it's also true that silence can be taken as support for the current state of affairs, and that's not necessarily an impression I want to give, so I'll take the chance of speaking up. If I make any serious mistakes, I'm sure that my readership will correct me.

The first thing I'll say is that, from my perspective at least, I've seen very little explicit racism or sexism in the atheist community, and when it does appear, it's usually swiftly slapped down. Consider Larry Darby, the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying atheist who ran in a primary for attorney general of Alabama a few years back - he complained that atheists, whom he had hoped would support his campaign, instead almost unanimously rejected him when he made his racist beliefs clear. Darby lost the race by a large margin, and subsequently announced his conversion to Christianity.

But while the atheist community doesn't tolerate explicit bigotry, there are more subtle kinds of prejudice that are more difficult to notice and correct. It does give me a faint feeling of disquiet to realize that the four most visible and prominent atheists - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett - are all white men. And this trend tends to be repeated at skeptical conferences and gatherings: white males are overrepresented in the atheist community in general (at least in America), relative to their share of the population at large. As Greta Christina says, when a situation like this arises, it's rarely an accident.

This isn't to say that the atheist community is all white men; much the contrary. We have brilliant historians like Susan Jacoby and Jennifer Michael Hecht, who've written superb books (Freethinkers and Doubt: A History, respectively) highlighting the contributions of nonbelievers from all cultures throughout history. There are journalists and authors like Ann Druyan, Michelle Goldberg and Nica Lalli. There's Julia Sweeney, whose "beautiful loss of faith" story is told movingly and poignantly. There's the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which was created by atheist and feminist advocate Anne Nicol Gaylor and is still co-presidented by her daughter, Annie Laurie Gaylor, along with Dan Barker. There are people of color like Neil de Grasse Tyson, Reginald Finley (the Infidel Guy), Hemant Mehta, Taslima Nasrin, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, and Ibn Warraq. And especially, there's Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is both a woman and a person of color, and whose book Infidel I still consider to be the single most powerful, eloquent, and inspiring book on atheism that I've ever read.

Nor do we lack for diversity historically. Many pioneering feminists were uncompromising atheists, and freethought was a strong and lively element of cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance. In my series on the contributions of freethinkers, I've done my best to feature women and people of color to show that atheism and religious skepticism have a far broader and deeper history than most people are aware of.

So, clearly, the problem isn't that atheism is exclusively for whites or for men. Our message has the potential to appeal to people of all kinds. And why should that be a surprise? The positive values that atheism has to offer aren't specific to any race or gender; they are human values that all people can share in and rejoice in. We offer liberation and freedom - freedom from the clinging cobwebs of religious dogma, freedom from the suffocating fear of hellfire, freedom from the locks and bars of archaic edicts and irrational laws, and in place of all this, an ethic of equality, a philosophy of happiness, and a morality based on empathy and human rights. This is a message that women and minorities, who know all too well how easily religion can be used to oppress, should be eager to embrace.

I'm not saying that white male atheists are doing anything wrong by speaking up. We need them too! Everyone who's willing to come out as an atheist has a part to play in our movement, whatever your gender or race. Nor do I think that anyone, white or black, male or female, should be raised to a prominence that they haven't merited by their own efforts. But I do think that white male atheists should be making more of an effort to learn about the specific concerns of women and minorities, to speak in language that addresses those concerns, and to extend a hand of welcome to members of these groups and invite them to join in our movement. It's an effort that's not only worthwhile for its own sake, but that will pay dividends down the line.

I've been reading this essay from Sikivu Hutchinson in the L.A. Watts Times, which calls on black atheists to come out of the closet while acknowledging the difficulties they face in doing so. The cultural barriers, she says, are even greater than for white atheists: African-American culture is "heavily steeped" in Christian dogma, the legacy of a "culturally specific survival strategy" - in the slave era, it served them as a unifying force and a source of comfort (despite the fact that it was also the religion of the slaveholders). That legacy persists even today, as she notes: "In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gangbangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God."

The only way to overcome this in the long run is for more black atheists to speak out, but it might also help to point out that some famous figures of the black community have held unorthodox views. I've written before about the life and skepticism of the civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, but he was by no means the only prominent African-American who was also a freethinker - as we'll see from today's post.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a rural community that was one of the first all-black towns founded in America after the Emancipation Proclamation. Her father, John Hurston, was a Baptist preacher and later the mayor. Her childhood in Eatonville, by her account, was idyllic: in an all-black community, she was blissfully insulated from the racism that still pervaded much of the country, even though her preacher father sought to stifle young Zora's rebellious spirit.

The end of this happy time came in 1904, when Hurston's mother Lucy died; Zora was only 13 at the time. Her father, "bare and bony of comfort and love", remarried, but had little time or attention for his children. She was sent away to finish school, but ended up working at a series of menial jobs, including a Gilbert & Sullivan theater troupe, where she worked as a maid to the lead singer. She wound up in Baltimore, where finally finished high school in 1918, at the age of 26 - although she gave her age as 16. For the rest of her life, she would always cut at least ten years off her date of birth in public.

In 1925, Hurston was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, a New York City affiliate of Columbia University. She studied anthropology under the noted scholar Franz Boas; one of her fellow students was Margaret Mead. But more importantly for her own literary career, she had the good fortune to be living in Manhattan at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston met and collaborated with black writers and artists like Langston Hughes; she published both fiction and, drawing on her background in anthropology, books such as Mules and Men that documented customs and folklore of the black community in the United States and the Caribbean. Her masterwork was the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was judged one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (source). Her other books include Mules and Men (1935), Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

Despite her literary acclaim, Hurston never achieved the financial success her work deserved. She died, penniless, in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave, where she lay forgotten for decades until her writing, and her burial site, was rediscovered by a young writer named Alice Walker.

What's less well known is that Zora Neale Hurston, throughout her life, was a freethinker. Of her childhood, she later wrote: "My head was full of misty fumes of doubt... Neither could I understand the passionate declarations of love for a being that nobody could see. Your family, your puppy and the new bull-calf, yes. But a spirit away off who found fault with everybody all the time, that was more than I could fathom" (source).

An extended excerpt from Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, makes the point even clearer. In a long, beautiful passage, one that predates the work of Carl Sagan and other famous scientific popularizers, she writes of her own feeling of interconnection with the cosmos, and her knowledge that the atoms of her body will outlast death and go on to take new forms:

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out "how long?" to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers