What’s in a name?

This is the second (and hopefully last) post I will feel compelled to write about Atheism+, a group to which I have been assumed (by many) to belong to, but one about which I have thus far said essentially nothing. For those of you who don’t know, Jen McCreight recently stirred things up by announcing that she no longer felt at home with the atheist community at large, and recognized the existence of a subset of the larger atheist community who are focussed on issues that transcend religion per se and moving into larger arenas like anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-homophobia, and other so-called “social justice” issues. Because they were still identifying as atheists, but atheists who are interested in more than atheism, they branded this movement “Atheism+”.

The fallout has been typically ridiculous, with concern trolls and misogynist assholes alike flocking to social media to decry this development as a major schism and the death of atheism and a hostile takeover by radical feminists and… take your pick. The backlash against Jen specifically was so severe that she has temporarily but indefinitely suspended her blog – an entirely understandable move that serves only to showcase how at home the contingent of hateful, small-minded jerks feels among the anti-FTB/Skepchick/atheism+/anything-that-even-touches-feminism crowd.

Of course, as I noted this morning, Jen and those who immediately jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon didn’t create a schism in atheism, they merely identified one that already exists. It’s not the same as dumping your boyfriend because he’s a loser, it’s the recognition that you two weren’t dating in the first place and the fact that he keeps showing up at your house is getting inconvenient and creepy. There are people who want to talk about this ‘social justice’ stuff, and there are those who don’t. Those who don’t can probably be divided into those who are merely apathetic and those who foster an active antipathy, but that’s beside the point I want to make here.

One of the first posts I wrote was a first-pass encapuslation of a maxim I’ve done my best to live by ever since I took my first social psychology course: I am not my ideas. I closed that post by saying this: [Read more…]

Finding the faults

Years ago I was in a relationship with someone who for the sake of convenience I will simply call ‘Rhonda’. Rhonda and I began dating shortly after I started undergraduate, and lasted about a year before, for reasons that are not really relevant to the story, we split up. It was an amicable split, and we both said that it was important to remain friends. Meaning what I said, I would invite Rhonda to take part in the things I was doing, we’d talk on instant messaging and phone on a regular basis, and I generally tried to include her the way I would do for anyone with whom I shared a close friendship.

A number of frustrating months passed before I realized that, despite my best efforts, I was deeply dissatisfied with my friendship with Rhonda. While I made regular efforts to include her, she kept me at an arm’s length and consistently begged off socializing with me. It did not help when she began dating someone else – someone I knew, and did not like (a fact she knew well). It was obvious to everyone that Rhonda was romantically involved with this guy, but she refused to talk about it. I will not pretend to some kind of maturity that I did not possess (and may still not), and certainly I had the option of confronting her, but she knew that I was upset and (I believed) she knew about what.

Her failure to talk to me on this issue (and a number of others), either because she was unwilling or unable, suggested to me that we had strikingly different views on what ‘friendship’ meant. So one day I called her on it, and basically spelled it out: we should stop calling our relationship a ‘friendship’, because we were not behaving the way I thought friends should. Whatever it was we had was not a true friendship, and had not been for some time. She was upset, understandably, but as far as I was concerned the only thing I had done was put words to something that was abundantly clear. [Read more…]

The eye of the beholder

One common claim that comes up in discussions of social justice issues is the following, predominantly uttered by a member of the majority group:

I am against all kinds of discrimination. In fact, I am never hesitant to call others on their own prejudiced behaviours!

What usually follows is the word ‘but’, and then some explanation of how ze is the real victim of discrimination because people keep telling hir to check hir privilege, often with accusations of being bigoted* or something of that nature. The reasoning, I imagine, goes something like this:

I believe myself to be opposed to discrimination
I behave in a way that is consistent with someone who is opposed to discrimination
Therefore your accusations of my prejudice are misplaced

I can certainly appreciate how much it sucks to have someone call you a bigot when all you’re trying to do is express reasonable skepticism about something. This is especially true when you are a passionate defender of the very people making the accusation. From an outsider’s perspective, it can certainly seem as though the name-calling is completely offside – they should recognize that you are an ally and you are doing your best.

Maybe the following expansion of the above syllogism can help flesh out why this attitude is problematic and will lead you into more trouble: [Read more…]

Special Feature: Crommunist does alternative medicine

Many of you will remember that I attended the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops, BC in May of this year. It was my first ever atheist meeting/convention, and I had a really positive experience there. I was asked to me a somewhat last-minute addition to a panel on alternative medicine, based (I imagine) on my background in health sciences, my experience public speaking, and the fact that at least a handful of people would recognize my name.

And so it was that I found myself sitting next to Skeptically Speaking host Desiree Schell, and Dr. Ian Mitchell (a local physician), talking about the wild and wooly world of alt-med. Long-time readers will know how irritated I am by the term “alternative medicine”:

These “alternative medicines” are not alternative in any way – if they work, then they aren’t alternative, they’re just medicine. The other side of the problem is the ones that are truly “alternative” aren’t medicine! They don’t work any better than voodoo or augury or invoking ancestor’s spirits.

I’m also irritated (clearly, as you will see from the video) by the doggerel: “cancer cure” and the associated conspiracy theory that pharmaceutical companies are hiding cancer cures from the public. I tried my level best to apply my own personal brand of smackdown to this odious and ludicrously nonsensical claim, with all the humour and aplomb that I could muster at 9 am after a night of drinking. I also made reference to a couple of things that the local chapter of CFI had done – debunking Deepak Chopra and staging a homeopathy workshop. Both were examples of skeptical activism, or as we coined it, ‘skeptivism’.

The full video from the event is available below the fold. [Read more…]

Quitting: a reason for optimism

Because I live in the same city as Natalie Reed, I occasionally have the opportunity to bump into her and talk about stuff outside the medium-constrained environs of the internet. Our most recent encounter happened the afternoon before she posted her hard-hitting piece about the casual ease with which cis-privileged assholes can dehumanize a trans person. I suspect it happened after our chat, because she didn’t say anything about it to me. Instead, the subject of our conversation that day was the thesis of the article that would appear the next day:

Let them have The Movement. Let it be a club for entitled little white cis straight dudes to get together and tell each other how fucking smart they all are to know that John Edwards is lying, and there’s no bearded sky daddy doling out favour on the basis of how rarely you eat shellfish or have hot queer sex. Let them go right on thinking of themselves as the few insightful rebels who could see through The Matrix and now fight against the evil machinations of Andrew Schlafy and Jennifer McCreight. Let them live in their mythologies. Let them sink, bit by bit, into self-congratulatory, insulated irrelevance, while the rest of us get on with actually trying to help make the world a bit less of a mess.

Natalie expressed, in her inimitable way, her exasperation over the seeming intractable assholery of the atheist movement and offered some potential explanations for why these problems not only keep resurfacing, but why they may be a feature (rather than a bug) of who the movement is and how we interact. The most compelling hypothesis she offers is that atheism may serve as a civil rights issue for those who otherwise have no fight with which they can identify – middle-class cis white men have finally found something they can get outraged about, and can do so without having to confront any of their own privilege or sloppy thinking when it comes to non-Bigfoot-related subject matter. [Read more…]

Getting token in

I have, at various points in my life, been the ‘token black guy’ in one social group or another. In the smaller groups it’s been simply the result of small numbers – if there’s 4 people in a group then it’s not exactly surprising that there will a token somethingorother. In other activities, my tokenism was the result of niche interests – there were precious few other black kids in either the youth orchestra or the drama program.* Still others, like both my undergrad and graduate school experiences, were due to things that would probably require some in-depth sociology to answer.

I don’t watch very much television these days – a function of little interest and little time – but I have long been familiar with the practice of inserting a token dark face into commercials. The idea, I suppose, is to show that even black people like to eat at The Keg, or something, provided they are surrounded by their white friends who get the vast majority of the camera time. Much rarer are the commercials where folks of colour make up the majority, with a few white faces peppered in (salted in?) for ‘diversity’. Now, this may be vastly different in other parts of the world, and if it is I would very much like to be made aware of that.

If we are indeed as ‘post-racial’ as we pretend to be; if race really “doesn’t matter” when casting a group of friends enjoying beers on a patio, then there is really no good reason why there should so often be only one (or, if you’re really progressive, perhaps two) people of colour in your commerical, or in your office, or in your cabinet, or in your [insert endeavour here]. The fact that this is the case with depressing frequency leads me to believe that tokenism is nothing more than a shallow show of forced diversity aimed at showing how ‘not racist’ your group is. “Racist? Couldn’t be. If we were racist, would we have hired Angela? She’s… um… Thai. Or Taiwanese. Or Turkish. Something weird with a T.” [Read more…]

The one-way mirror of racial privilege

One of the most powerful tools we have when trying to parse an argument is the analogy. We can take the elements of a position, plug them in to a different context, and then press ‘play’ to see whether or not the argument still logically follows. So when a religious apologist talks about the perfect love and perfect mercy of YahwAlladdha, we can ask if it would still be considered ‘loving’ to lock your children in the basement and torture them (for any amount of time, let alone eternity) if they disobeyed your rules. We can point out the absurdity of demanding that atheists ‘play nice’ or ‘leave well enough alone’ by pointing to the similarities between ours and other civil rights movements, and show how active engagement in the public sphere is vital to progress.

Accustomed as we are to the incredible usefulness of this tool, there are cases where it goes horribly awry – namely, those cases in which privilege plays a significant role. At once, argument by analogy becomes completely derailed, and to the person drawing the (flawed) analogy, it seems as though the “privilege card” is being pulled out of nowhere. The argument seems to be, to them, that one is wrong simply because ze is white, or male, or cisgendered, or whatever dominant group identity is germane to the conversation – that the mere fact of being in the majority immediately disqualifies your arguments. Then out come the waterworks: “you’re just as bad as those you criticize – my opinion is being dismissed as you complain about people dismissing yours!”

Animated .gif of a Decepticon laughing and shooting lasers

Let’s just jump ahead a few paragraphs to the end of the argument and state unequivocally that your argument is bad, and you should feel bad.

Now that everyone who needs to learn this lesson has stopped reading, let’s forge ahead, shall we? [Read more…]

Talking the tightrope

I’m not sure how many of you are aware of the sheer unmitigated genius that is the comedy of Mitch Hedburg, but if you haven’t heard his repertoire of brilliant one-liners, please do yourself the favour of wrapping your ears around one of his albums. One of my favourites of his goes something like this:

“If you had a friend who was a tightrope walker, and you were walking down a sidewalk, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable…”

His bits are all like that – observations that were seemingly plucked from the weirdest and most non-sequitur place imaginable. This one in particular resonated with me because it almost perfectly encapsulates how I feel when I hear fellow skeptics repeating, often with no ill intent, the same kinds of racist nonsense I hear from the general public.

The thesis underpinning this blog, at least the part of this blog that specifically deal with race, is that we can use skeptical methods to identify the racial components of attitudes, behaviours, and institutions. In so doing, we can learn to mitigate the damage caused by these things, and find productive ways to address topics that are often fraught with emotional landmines that can be triggered by careless statements, no matter how delicately put. Anti-racism in this context is therefore simply the application of skepticism to issues of culture, history, and social constructs around ethnicity.* [Read more…]

Scorching the common ground

One night many months ago I was poking around on Twitter and was alerted to the now-notorious Love Letter to Creeps penned by Mallorie Nasrallah. As I was participating in the resulting fracas, I crossed swords with skeptic, magician, and broken record Penn Jillette who, in response to my attempting to clarify exactly where the problem was in Mallorie’s letter, sent me this bizarre tweet:

Penn: I don't believe you and I have any real disagreement on how people should be treated. None.

Me: but she IS trying to invalidate the experiences of others, based on her own. And you apparently agree with her.
Penn: I don’t believe you and I have any real disagreement on how people should be treated. None.

Confused by this seeming complete non-sequitur, especially since we did disagree, I pressed the point: [Read more…]

A response to geraldmcgrew on harassment

I have been going back and forth with a commenter under the handle ‘geraldmcgrew’ who was ousted from a Pharyngula comment thread. He feels that his expulsion was unfair. For the record, while I understand why he received the rough treatment he did, I think the initial response to his question was egregious and unfair. I don’t have a banning procedure here, but I am satisfied that geraldmcgrew’s behaviour (specifically, repeatedly posing a question to which he had received several responses) was the reason for his banning, not simply the fact of his dissent.

That being said, he asked the following question in response to the related question of sexual harassment policies:

Except “being hit on = sexual harassment” is exactly what is repeatedly stated in this community. Heck, it was expressed in PZ’s first post to TF!

“The argument encompasses meetings, but also the larger geek and atheist culture, which turns out to be pretty damned sexist. You do not correct the broader problem by turning a blind eye to the specifics; it doesn’t work to say that you reject misogyny, but oh, that meeting there? It’s OK if you hit on women there. It’s OK if you abuse women in a bar; bars are free-range markets for men to exercise their will.”

Hitting on someone is lumped in with abuse of women? Sheesh…

My response to this question, coloured as it was by my zeal to provide a mindful response (as opposed to the accusations that I “mindlessly” defend anything), ran a bit long. I am posting it here both to avoid making the already-loaded comments section of that post grow to an absurd length, but also to highlight what I think is a reasonable response to a question that I suspect many people do not fully understand.

[Read more…]