"The Uppity Negress & the O.G.s"

[rug]

Last edited Tue Jun 12, 2012, 01:54 PM - Edit history (1)

June 11, 2012 at 6:32 pm
blackskeptics
By Sikivu Hutchinson

Word on the street has it that that uppity Negress/bad bitch from Black Skeptics has elicited “complaints” from a cabal of festering white men. Last week PZ Myers reported that he and a few others had gotten an industry memo about her article “Black Atheists Rising” in the International Humanists News journal. Since uppity Negress/bad bitch wasn’t cc’ed she can only guess how the virtual smackdown went but PZ did a good job of checking the o.g. gangstas. In a 2000-plus word article about the social justice outreach and scholarship of non-believers of color seems the O.G.s were most riled about the Negress’ wack critique of white supremacy and scientism in the Kumbaya atheist nation.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not far far away, the Negress attended the American Humanist Association (AHA) conference in New Orleans. On the way to the hotel and the virtually all white conference she rolled through dilapidated segregated neighborhoods in an air-conditioned shuttle bus. Post-Katrina the income and wealth gap between blacks and whites has become more gargantuan. Black unemployment has skyrocketed, black residential displacement is still prevalent, New Orleans schools are hyper-segregated and charterized, and the city is no less churched than it was several years ago. During a seminar the Negress facilitated on Culturally Relevant Humanism some of the white participants got all bothered when she introduced the alien concept of the dominant culture. The seminar went through a variation of Peggy McKintosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” exercise in which race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability privileges are highlighted by who moves where in the room. For example, white folk will never have to worry about their kids being Trayvon Martin. White folk can bet that if they choose to have children they will always be able to see people of their race and/or gender represented in textbooks as authority figures and leaders in science and philosophy. Historically, from the postwar FHA to mortgage lender Countrywide to Louisiana’s Road Homeowner Assistance Program, white homeowners have benefited from affirmative action policies that built white wealth and institutionalized segregated residential patterns. Being of the dominant culture means never seeing it. It means having a near religious belief that good meritocratic shit like living wage jobs, home loans, tenure, and safe communities just come to you because you’re more enlightened, talented, disciplined, and hard working than those lazy shiftless racial others who are in church 24/7 and don’t subscribe to evolution.

During the seminar AHA development director Maggie Ardiente (an outstanding leader and the only other woman of color there) and Dr. Anthony Pinn both reflected on how they are constantly being told by whites in the “movement” that they don’t see them as people of color, don’t see their race, implicitly see them as exceptions, ad nauseum ad infinitum. As Pinn argues in his essential book African American Humanist Principles, white American Humanism was based on the elevation of the (white) universal subject and the construction of the racial other:

“European humanism and white American humanism develop under the assumption of human worth and integrity. That is to say, these two modalities of humanism emerge in light of an assumed value and worth. They develop as the “surface” of Renaissance and Enlightenment confidence. Yet, for those of African descent it is a different story. They are the underbelly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in that the advances that shape these two periods occur in part because of the slave trade, and the overdetermination and dehumanization of Africans. Mindful of this, one can safely say African American humanism is a reaction against modernity and its ramifications. The ‘freedom’ upon which modernity rests…was not meant for Africans; rather African bodies provided the raw material for this freedom.”

http://freethoughtblogs.com/blackskeptics/2012/06/11/the-uppity-negress-the-o-g-s/

[SouthernLiberal]

1. I guess it was the way I was raised

I have never seen black Americans as essentially different than myself. That does not keep me from recognizing that in America at large that is not true.

[tech3149]

4. I guess you and I share a view of the world based on experience rather than

ideology. I grew up in a total white bread rural suburb. After graduating HS I was living in a poor urban area considered to be the worst as far as safety because of the predominance of black residents. I never felt unsafe, never had any problems that couldn't be talked out. In fact, I probably made more friends than I had in the preceding 18 years.
After that I moved to NJ and lived and worked with people of every variation of ethnic and cultural background.
My well past 50 years of experience taught me one thing. In spite of all our differences we are more the same than not.

[trotsky]

2. I am impressed with how quickly PZ Myers acknowledged Hutchinson's POV...

as well his own white male privilege.

This has always been a great difficulty for Christians in this country, to recognize their religious privilege. Glad to see "hated" (at least in here) figures in non-belief confronting the issue of privilege head on.

[laconicsax]

6. +1

[cbayer]

3. Whoa! Scary black woman taking on white, male privileged elite.

Good for her! Sound like a whole lot of shakeup needs to occur for this organization to get on the right track.

[laconicsax]

5. Scary?

What makes her "scary?"