Shives explains why we need (a lot more) secular social justice

It’s not often I watch a video of someone excoriating the organized atheist movement and find myself agreeing with every word of it, but such is the case here.

Transcript:

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STEVE SHIVES: One of the most positive experiences I ever had as an atheist was back in 2012, at the first Reason Rally. I was born and raised, and continued to live, in an area where religious faith, almost always in the form of some flavor or another of Christianity, is taken for granted. Being an atheist surrounded by religious folks, many of whom are quite outspoken about their faith, can be an alienating experience.

So when I found myself standing on the National Mall in 2012 – God look at my fat, bare baby face – anyway, when I found myself standing there, surrounded by thousands of other people who shared my lack of religious faith, it left an impression: I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t isolated. I was part of a community, a growing, energetic, enthusiastic community.

I’ve long believed that a crucial step in leading a happy and fulfilling life is finding your people. That day at the Reason Rally in 2012, I felt as though I had found my people.

Didn’t turn out to be true, but still … nice memory.

Since the rise of the New Atheists, personified most prominently by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris – the so-called Four Horsemen – the organized atheist movement has become as closely associated with bigotry and sexual misconduct as with reason and enlightenment. It’s a shame, but the real shame of it is that such associations are completely justified.

Atheist spaces both in real life and online have been dominated by cis-hetero White men for as long as I’ve been an active participant, and efforts by women, people of color, LGBTQ people and members of other marginalized groups to push back against that domination have always been met with responses ranging from indifference to outright hostility. That reluctance to embrace and prioritize the task of making atheist spaces more inclusive would be bad enough, were it not present alongside a stubborn tolerance of sexual misconduct. Numerous prominent atheist men, most notably Richard carrier and Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer, have been credibly accused of committing acts of sexual harassment and abuse, and made to face little to no professional consequences as a result. They still published books, they still appear in high-profile speaking slots at conferences, and they are still zealously defended from such accusations by their devoted admirers.

Given these conditions, it’s no wonder that many activists who might otherwise wish to work within the movement have chosen instead to distance themselves from organized atheism. For those of us who still cling to the naive hope that organized atheism can still be salvaged and put to some good productive use, one of the greatest challenges we face is convincing our fellow atheists that there’s even a problem.

Oh, it’s not that difficult to get someone to acknowledge the existence of, say, misogyny, or racism, or xenophobia within atheist circles. But that acknowledgment is almost always swiftly followed by an attempted dismissal. “Oh sure, there are atheists who are racist or sexist or whatever,” I’ve heard I-don’t-know-how-many people in the community say, “but you can’t let a few bad apples spoil the bushel! Most atheists aren’t like!”

This apathetic, baseless optimism about the state of organized atheism is as corrosive as the problems it ignores, and rarely has it been on more conspicuous display than in the months surrounding Mythicist Milwaukee’s Mythinformation conference last year. I’ve talked about Mythcon in previous videos, so I won’t go into any more detail here than absolutely necessary. If you want a more in-depth perspective of what Mythcon was, why it was a problem, and why it was a problem that more people in the atheist community didn’t have a problem with it, I recommend you check out the channel of my pal chrisiousity. She recently produced two videos on the lead-up to and fallout from Mythcon. They’re both linked in the description of this video, they’re excellent, I highly recommend them.

When people like Kristi Winters, Dan Arel and myself began speaking out against the organizers of Mythcon for choosing to associate themselves and their event with some of the most toxic voices in the atheist community, including several YouTubers who built their followings by promoting rape apology and inciting abuse and harassment against feminists and racial equality activists, we were met, not only by attacks from the people we were protesting, which was to be expected, but also by a worried disapproval from people we assumed would have been on our side of things. People who had presented themselves as progressive, tolerant and socially conscious.

what I realized as a result of the Mythcon debacle, and what many people knew already, was that for a lot of folks, supporting equality and justice is about theory rather than practice. It’s performative. It’s about talking the talk, expressing disapproval of the right wrong things, and it’s almost always directed outward: Look over there, look at what those people are doing, isn’t that terrible?

We atheists are accustomed to behaving this way. Many of us who came to the movement as a result of the popularity of New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens first encountered skepticism in the form of a critique of religion, or a debunking of Creationism, or a debate where our favorite atheist trounced some pompous apologist. It was about exposing how wrong they were, and reveling and how right we were. We’re good at that. We enjoy that. It makes us feel superior, whether or not we choose to characterize it that way. It’s satisfying. It’s comfortable.

Maybe that’s why, as eager as we are to direct our skepticism toward external targets, we’re equally reluctant to turn it inward. Because skeptically examining our own communities, our organizations, our heroes, ourselves, is not satisfying, at least not at first. And it’s not comfortable. Pointing out the shortcomings of others is easy. Listening while others point out your shortcomings is hard. And harder still is taking it in, giving those criticisms a fair hearing, acknowledging those shortcomings. And hardest of all is taking that acknowledgement of your own shortcomings and translating it into productive action. Hardest of all is trying to change.

It’s not just the presence of racists, misogynists, sexual harasser and other abusive or intolerant people that’s the problem. It’s the tolerance of their presence and, in some cases, even the defense of their presence by people who claim to be on the side of justice and equality. It’s the constant attempts to change the subject when the issues of abuse and harassment and intolerance within atheist circles are raised. It’s referring to people who try to talk about these problems as “divisive” or an “outrage brigade” or “fear pimps”. It’s a popular respected voice within the community telling his audience, “Yes, these problems exist; yes, those people are bad; but this isn’t really all that important, and I’m not going to do anything about it.” And it’s treating issues of importance to Black atheists, trans atheists, atheist women as distractions or niche concerns, which only serves to reinforce a status quo where the voices of the marginalized are silenced or belittled with tokenism while White cis het men continue to dominate the discourse.

The problem is so many of us atheists who fancy ourselves as open-minded, tolerant, progressive, socially-conscious-type guys fail to see or are too cowardly to face is that Mythcon was not an aberration. The attitudes that created and sustained it, and compelled people to defend it and make excuses for it, are not rare in our community. They are pervasive.

This state of affairs goes well beyond the atheist community, of course. One of the most difficult realizations I had to come to following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was that he was not an aberration, either. He was not an alien. He was a product of our society. He was of us. To focus exclusively, on him and not the factors that elevated him to the presidency, would be to treat the symptom while ignoring the disease.

It’s less daunting to regard people like Trump or events like Mythcon as aberrations, because then the fix is relatively simple: Just win the next election. And that’s if you decide that it’s a problem even worth worrying about in the first place. Maybe you should just let them have their shitlord conference next time! I mean, what do you care? Sure, it was embarrassing when all those people applauded for the guy who publicly taunted a woman about her sexual assault, but don’t blow it out of proportion. Don’t you know that trying to stop intolerant people from spreading their intolerance makes you just as bad as they are?

Sincere Kirabo, the Social Justice Coordinator at the American Humanist Association, recently wrote about how common the attitudes of the organizers of Mythcon and those who supported it are within atheist and secular humanist movement circles, and how the pervasiveness of these attitudes have caused him to disassociate with organized atheism. He writes: “It’s too common to meet those involved in this movement who not only don’t prioritize matters of social change for collective liberation, but also regard those who value these ambitions with contempt.” He goes on to say, “Those aren’t my people[.]”

They aren’t my people, either. I used to think they were – some of them, at least. When we all stood together almost six years ago on the National Mall, I thought of all of them my people. But I was wrong. And I’m glad I was wrong. People who applauded the denigration of women are my people. People who vilify and belittle people of color and activists who fight against racial injustice aren’t my people. People who dehumanize and denigrate trans people aren’t my people. People who engage in sexual harassment and abuse, or defend those who, do aren’t my people. And people who know that all of those things happen all the time in their own community, and look the other way, aren’t my people either.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are many people besides myself and Sincere who have largely or entirely disassociated from the movement as a result of these issues I’ve been talking about. Many who stood in the crowd, or in a few cases onstage, at the first Reason Rally but have now walked away from organized atheism.

So who are my people? And if what I’ve spent this video complaining about is the problem, what is the solution?

I strongly suspect I will find elements of both at a conference I’m attending in Washington, DC the first Saturday in April. I’m talking about Secular Social Justice 2018, a conference hosted by the American Humanist Association dedicated to amplifying the voices of people of color, addressing issues related to racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and teaching activists and organizers what they need to know to help drive social progress forward, all from a secular humanist perspective. It’s a one-day conference from 9 to 5 on Saturday, April 7th, at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, DC. General admission is just 25 bucks, plus 10 bucks if you want to throw in lunch. I got my tickets a few weeks ago, best money I’ve spent all year. If this sounds like something that you’re interested in and you can make it to DC on Saturday, April 7th, then ssj2018.com is where you need to go.

I am so looking forward to listening to, learning from, and meeting some fantastic people, some of whom I’ve admired for years. Like Sikivu Hutchinson, who wrote Moral Combat, a fantastic book, and who is one of the driving forces behind secular social justice. People who care about building a better world, who care about lifting up those who have been pushed down, who care about making sure that people who have been unjustly ignored or erased have a chance to speak and be heard, and who are brave enough to apply the values of reason and humanism not just to others, but to themselves.

Those are my people. Those are the people I want to spend time with and be humbled and motivated and inspired by. Those are the people I want to fight alongside. Those are the people whose friendship and trust I strive to be worthy of. Those are the people I hope to be counted among.

A few short years ago, it seemed like my fellow atheists and I were all part of the winning team, in a sense – we may have been outnumbered by larger society, but we were the ones who were right, dangit, and if only the rest of the world could take off their religious blinkers they’d come to their senses. And to be fair, I do still feel that way about matters of religion – that stuff is a cancer that eats away at everything it touches. But on the whole, it’s been a sobering experience to realize that socially conscious atheists are only a minority within a movement that has largely been taken over by a coalition of obsessively hateful cranks and their gutless, equivocating enablers, both of whom go up in arms the moment someone suggests we should examine whether our attitudes keep us complicit in the silencing of those who don’t fit the majority mold.

The thing about sobering up, though: It’s deeply disheartening to realize things aren’t as rosy as you once thought, but the process of disillusionment also leaves you better prepared to face the real world. And as unpleasant as it is to accept that atheism is full of terrible people, I’d much rather have a smaller circle of friends and allies I can be proud to associate with than find myself in a larger crowd that rallies behind any dipshit who makes a crack about “feminazis”, or a YouTuber who tries to trigger a rape victim, or an influential magazine that defends a convicted serial child molester. It’s your basic quality-over-quantity affair, and one Steve Shives or Sikivu Hutchinson or PZ Myers or Anita Sarkeesian is worth more than the rest of the Four Horsemen and their collected apologists combined.

(via Pharyngula)