Atheism should be science and social justice, not science vs. social justice

I have received a couple of complaints about Sikivu Hutchinson, complaints that were also cc’ed to a number of big names in the atheist movement, which is weird. Why complain to me? Apparently my correspondent wants me to write a rebuttal to some remarks she made in the May issue of International Humanist News. Here are the offensive comments:

Engaging in science fetishism without a social justice lens merely reproduces the white supremacist logic of the New Atheist Movement.

If much of the New Atheist fervor springs from the endless culture war over evolution and church/state separation, contemporary black humanist ideology emerges from a social justice lens.

Oh, man, I can top those. In Hutchinson’s book, Moral Combat (you should read it), she has a chapter titled “The White Stuff: New Atheism and Its Discontents” in which she really opens up.

Being marginalized is not a revelation for most African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American folk accustomed to invisibility in all white institutions. For example, despite conservative claims of a left wing academic “mafia,” buttressed by preferential treatment toward so-called minorities, American academia remains a largely white preserve powered by cronyism, favoritism, and affirmative action for white elites. The majority of tenured faculty, permanent administrators, presidents, and chancellors at American universities are white. The struggle that academics of color frequently face getting hired and getting tenure has negative consequences (particularly in predominantly white fields like science and engineering) for recruitment and retention of students of color. Tenure, publication, conference presentations, and participation in committees determine status, visibility, and career longevity in the academic community. All are key factors in the dissemination of scholarship. So it is no coincidence that many of the major figures and spokespersons in the humanist atheist movements come from academia (such as Oxford, Tufts, Stanford, and the University of Minnesota), where they have benefited from the ivory tower politics of faculty recruitment, hiring, and tenure. Yet for some reason many white atheist humanists believe that just being an atheist magically exempts them from the institutionally racist belief systems and practices of the dominant culture.

Who could she be talking about at the University of Minnesota? Ouch.

She also makes the argument in that book that the black community’s affiliation with religion has been an advantage for them — it’s been a “bulwark against white supremacy and institutional racism.” What kind of atheist is this?

Unfortunately, I can’t write a rebuttal…because she’s right, damnit.

The universities really are bastions of paleness, and the sciences in particular are uniform; we try and are trying to correct that, give us some credit, but I have to acknowledge that I am the recipient of vast amounts of privilege, and a black or Native American applicant would have had to work much harder than I did to land my position. That’s reality. I have to recognize it, I’m a scientist!

I agree with her completely that the New Atheist movement has largely been about science and politics: and that’s OK, those are real issues, and we need to deal with them. But problems arise when we assume that those are the only issues, and that a utopia will follow if only we teach science and math in the elementary schools and get around to enforcing the separation of church and state. That’s what she means by “white supremacist logic”, the idea that white men’s priorities are the only priorities that matter. She summarizes those with only a little exaggeration here:

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